


The Vagaries of Disbelief

by sevenfists



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Originally Posted on LiveJournal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-05-10
Updated: 2006-05-10
Packaged: 2018-10-24 09:56:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10739340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenfists/pseuds/sevenfists
Summary: Dean slept until almost 10:00 on the morning of June 4. He rolled over in bed, opened his mouth to bitch at Sam for letting him sleep so late, closed it again. Sam was missing: gone overnight, vanished from the bed.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> An AU after "Provenance." Thanks to lyra_wing, innie_darling, and annalazarus for beta work.

**PART ONE  
** May – June 2007  
Dean slept until almost 10:00 on the morning of June 4. He rolled over in bed, opened his mouth to bitch at Sam for letting him sleep so late, closed it again. Sam was missing: gone overnight, vanished from the bed. The line of salt in front of the door was unbroken. Dean scoured the whole city anyway, spent three days retracing their steps and interrogating everyone he could find. He came out of it empty-handed, of course. Sam had disappeared from a locked motel room, no signs of a struggle, no signs of anything. Just gone.

It started like this:

Sam found the article during the last week of May: a handful of bear attacks in Yakima, the bodies eaten and the bones scattered. "Look at this," he said, and tossed the paper onto the bed, where Dean was sitting.

Dean picked it up. "Bear maulings aren't really our specialty, Sam," he said when he was finished reading.

"There aren't any grizzlies in Washington. Don't you think that's a little weird?"

"Last I heard, there's a few of them living up in the Cascades. Maybe one of them just wandered south a little, big deal. Anyway, black bears can kill people, too."

Sam's mouth was set in a stubborn line. "I still think we should check it out."

"Maybe," Dean said, and drained his coffee mug.

That would have been the end of it, except Sam was a hard-headed bastard and wouldn't let it go. When they stopped for gas, he pulled out the laptop and kept harassing Dean with statistics while Dean fiddled around under the hood of the car, adding more coolant and wiper fluid.

"There's only been one recorded bear fatality in Washington State," Sam said, and then a bit later, "You're more likely to _drown_ in Yellowstone than be attacked by a bear." And then, "Most bear attacks happen in the wilderness, which Yakima is definitely _not_."

"Jesus Christ, all right!" Dean said, shutting the hood. "We'll go check it out. Quit your goddamn fussing." He took a drag off his cigarette.

" _Thank_ you," Sam said sarcastically, but he stopped scowling and put the laptop away.

Dean didn't want to go to Yakima. He was tired, his bones felt tired, his whole body ached all the time. He'd been planning on holing up somewhere for a week or so, getting some sleep, letting Sam finish his psychotic break. He wasn't up for any of this crazy bear nonsense. But he couldn't say no to Sam – physically couldn't; every time he opened his mouth to do it, the words deserted him.

He scratched his shoulder. Sam was waiting in the car, looking pale and twitchy. Dean dropped his cigarette butt onto the pavement, ground it out with the heel of his boot.

It took them two days to get to Washington. Dean drove and Sam slept, and then Sam drove and Dean worried about the way he was shifting gears.

"God, don't dump the clutch like that!" Dean yelped, after a particularly violent shift into second.

Sam shifted right into third and dumped the clutch that time, too. "Whatever, Dean, you're the one who taught me how to drive, it's your own fault if I don't do it right."

Yakima was _dry_. Dean always associated Washington with rain and big trees, but east of the Cascades everything was kind of brown. They checked into a crappy motel on the outskirts of the city. Sam prowled around the room, poking at the blinds, looking inside the toilet tank.

"I'm going to get us some dinner," Dean said. "You want anything?"

"No," Sam said distractedly, busy checking under the double bed.

The grocery store was freezing. Dean's cart had a busted wheel and he couldn't steer it right, and he almost mowed down a little old lady who promptly gave him the finger. He bought Band-aids, witch hazel, Neosporin, toothpaste, two packs of Winstons, and a box of Hot Pockets; and for Sam, a jar of crunchy peanut butter, a bag of apples, and a huge-ass bottle of Pepto-Bismol.

"I told you I didn't want anything," Sam said when Dean got back to the room.

"Too bad. You haven't eaten anything since we left Wyoming."

"I'm not hungry." Sam was in bed, huddled under the blankets, even though it was hot out and Dean was only wearing a t-shirt.

Dean sat on the bed and rested his hand on Sam's forehead. He felt cool; a little clammy, even. "I got you some Pepto."

"I don't want it."

"Jesus Christ, Sam, you can't just starve to death! Take some Pepto and try to eat something, or I'm gonna force-feed you." He wasn't kidding. The not-eating stuff was getting ridiculous.

Sam rolled over so he was facing away from Dean. "Fine. I don't want the Pepto, though."

Dean watched like a hawk as Sam methodically spread peanut butter on three apple slices and ate them in neat bites. Sam finished chewing the third slice, set the knife down, and calmly went into the bathroom to vomit it all into the toilet. Dean rubbed a hand over his face.

"Take some goddamn Pepto," he said when Sam came out of the bathroom.

He thought Sam was going to argue more, but instead, Sam opened the bottle and carefully measured out a double dose. He ate two of the apples and half the jar of peanut butter, took another dose of Pepto, and went to bed without saying another word.

Dean put the peanut butter in Sam's duffel and went down the hall to heat up his Hot Pockets. Sam was giving him an ulcer. It had been like this for the past couple of weeks: Sam barely eating, throwing up everything he _did_ eat, sleeping maybe two hours a night. And the _nightmares_ , Christ, Dean was at the end of his rope. He didn't know what to do. Sam was losing his mind, and Dean was going crazy right along with him.

He ate his Hot Pockets standing beside the vending machine, reluctant to go back to the room, where Sam was probably sweating and tossing in his sleep, if he even _was_ sleeping. Dean was still lurking there when some chick came to get ice from the machine and eyed him like she thought he was a child molester. He gave her a sheepish smile and went outside for a smoke.

When he went back to their room, Sam was pretending to be asleep, but the tension in his face gave him away. Dean brushed his teeth in the dark. He laid a line of salt in front of the door, stripped down to his boxers, and crawled into bed with Sam.

"Go to sleep," he whispered into Sam's hair, and pressed a kiss to his bare shoulder. Sam rolled away from him. Dean fell asleep watching light from the street lamp make shifting patterns on the ceiling tiles.

He woke sometime in the night and found Sam wrapped around him, octopus-like, his cold feet pressing against Dean's legs. Dean kicked Sam's feet away and went back to sleep.

Sam had already showered and made coffee by the time Dean rolled out of bed at 6:30. He clearly hadn't slept much, but Dean kept his mouth shut. His black eye from their last fight hadn't completely faded. He didn't need a matching set.

They ate breakfast down the street. Sam had four bites of scrambled eggs, a cup of coffee, one strip of Dean's bacon, and half of what was left in the Pepto bottle.

"Quit looking at me like that," Sam said. "I'm not going to die."

"Eat some toast," Dean said.

They spent the rest of the morning poking around the city, trying to get information out of the cops and the Fish & Wildlife Service people. Dean flirted with the very young Wildlife agent chick until she told them that one person had survived a recent bear attack – a woman named Ellen Blackstone. Sam was delighted.

"I'll bet you ten bucks she knows what's going on," he said while they ate lunch – or rather, while Dean ate lunch and Sam fidgeted. He'd been twitchy as fuck all day, but when he spilled his coffee all over the table, Dean couldn't keep quiet any longer.

"Dude, if you need to go back to the motel – "

"I'm _fine_ ," Sam snapped.

Dean raised his eyebrows. "Whatever you say, _Sammy_."

They paid a visit to Ellen after lunch. She lived in a tiny white house just north of the city. Dean rang the doorbell while Sam stood behind him, off to one side, picking at the chipped paint on the porch railing.

There was movement inside the house, and then the door creaked open. A woman poked her head out. She was middle-aged, heavyset, careworn. She didn't look happy to see them.

Dean put on his best smile. "Ms. Blackstone, we're reporters from the – "

She cut him off. "If this is about the bear attack, I don't want to talk about it." She slammed the door in his face.

"Well, shit," Dean said. So much for that plan. He should have flashed her a badge or something, gone the officer route, but it was too late now. Sam had stopped picking at the railing; he was just staring down at it, looking for all the world like he didn't have a clue what had just happened. "Sam," Dean said. "Sam!"

Sam looked up finally. "Okay, let's go," he said, and headed for the car.

On the ride back to the motel, Sam was practically _quivering_ , jiggling his left leg and fussing around with the glove compartment. Dean shifted his ass around on the seat until he could reach the lighter and the pack of Winstons in his back pocket.

"I wish you would quit smoking," Sam said.

Dean ashed into an empty soda cup. "Yeah, well, wishing for something doesn't mean it's gonna happen," he snapped, fed up with Sam's bitching.

The motel room was dark and stifling. Dean propped the door open, trying to get some air circulation. Sam went right into the bathroom and started throwing up. It went on and on, Sam gagging and spitting, and God, there was no way he had a damn thing left in his stomach. Dean stood in the middle of the bedroom, torn between wanting to give Sam some privacy and wanting to go in there and make sure he wasn't choking on his own vomit.

Fuck it. Dean nudged the door open with his foot. Sam looked up from where he was hunched over the toilet. His eyes were too bright, his hair matted to his forehead.

"Shit, Sammy," Dean said, and knelt beside him on the floor, rubbing his back. Sam turned his head and dry-heaved again. Dean could feel the spasms rippling through his brother's body. It was painful to watch. Dean's own stomach clenched up in sympathy.

"I think I'm done," Sam said at last. He sprawled out on the floor, pressing his face to the linoleum tile.

Dean reached up and flushed the toilet. "You want me to get you some water?" He shifted until he was leaning against the sink vanity, his knees pulled up against his chest.

"Not just yet." Sam closed his eyes. He was shivering. "It wasn't a bear," he said.

"Um, what?" Dean said.

"Ellen. She was lying. It wasn't a bear."

"How the fuck do you know that?"

Sam covered his face with his hand. "I saw it in her head."

Oh Jesus Christ. "Sam," Dean said, doing his best to keep his tone light, "you feel like telling me what the _hell_ is going on here?"

"I don't _know_ ," Sam said more loudly, "I don't know what's happening to me, Dean, I don't – " His voice broke, then, and he stopped speaking.

"Okay," Dean said. "Okay. You brush your teeth, I'll get you something to drink."

It was a testimony to Sam's state of mind that he didn't argue. The vending machine down the hall didn't have any Gatorade, so Dean bought a can of ginger ale and took it back to the room.

Sam had wrapped himself in a blanket and was curled up in one of the crappy armchairs. Dean sat in the other one, handing Sam the soda can. Sam popped it open and sniffed at it, and took a swallow.

"Tell me what happened," Dean said.

"I don't know," Sam said. He drank some more of the soda. "I think – I feel like something's changing inside of me. I think I can do more than just bend soup spoons, now." His voice was high and strained. He sounded – shit, he sounded _scared_ , and Dean didn't know what to do, what to say that would make any of this better.

"And you could hear Ellen's thoughts," Dean said.

"Yeah." Sam pulled the blanket tighter around himself. "It wasn't like she was talking to me, though, it was a series of images, like I could see exactly what was going on inside her head."

"Could you – can you see inside _my_ head?"

"I can't read you," Sam said, his eyes fever-bright. "You're blocked off somehow."

"Okay," Dean said, really fucking glad that Dad had made him learn how to shield before they went up against that mind-reader in South Carolina. He chewed on his lower lip. It wasn't like he hadn't been expecting something like this out of Sam. After Max, Sam had gotten uncannily good at pinning down Dean's emotional state; he had infrequent but stunningly accurate accurate visions; and in the past few months, he'd started floating bullets and safety pins around their motel rooms. This was the next logical step, really, but Dean still wasn't ready for it. Sam was turning into someone he barely knew, someone who maybe even frightened him a little.

He pressed two fingers right between his eyes, where he could feel a tension headache building. The day was not going as planned. "So it wasn't a bear," he said.

Sam nodded. "It was a _head_ , like, a floating, severed head."

"A head," Dean repeated slowly.

"Yeah. She was out walking at night and this - the head flew at her and screamed really loud and started biting her."

"A _head_."

"Whatever, we've seen stranger things, Dean."

"Yeah, but – " Dean shook his head. "Dude, a _head_ that's able to _kill people_? I've never heard of anything like that."

"Me neither. We'll have to do some research." Sam set the soda can on the little end table wedged between the chairs. It was still at least half full. Dean rolled his eyes and finished it off.

"What's going to happen now?" Sam asked quietly. Dean knew he wasn't talking about the bear maulings. Or disembodied head maulings.

"I don't know," Dean said.

"I'm scared," Sam said, his voice barely audible.

"Okay." Dean let out a long breath. "How about we finish this job and then head to Lawrence, see if Missouri can figure out what's going on in that crazy head of yours."

"Yeah," Sam said. "Okay." He uncurled his legs and put his feet on the floor, scooted forward in the chair until his right knee was bumping against Dean's left. "Look, Dean, I know I've been a real pain in the ass lately, and now _this_ has happened, and – "

"Hey," Dean said. "I thought you were going insane, so reading minds is actually a step up from that." He leaned forward, kissed Sam's temple and his soft mouth. "It's gonna be okay. We'll figure it out."

Sam kissed him back, docile for once, not arguing, not stirring shit up. Dean cradled Sam's face in one hand and took what he could get. He was always just taking what he could get when it came to Sam. He wished it could be like this all the time, slow and easy, the two of them trading kisses back and forth like they had all the time in the world.

Wishing for something didn't mean it was going to happen, though. There were a lot of things Dean wasn't sure about in life, but he knew _that_ for dead certain.

***

"Whoa, look at this," Dean said, and turned the laptop so Sam could look at it.

Sam dragged his attention away from the books he was flipping through and scanned the text on the screen. "Nukekubi – what? Is this Japanese?"

"Yeah. Seriously, disembodied heads eating people – this might be it."

"A Japanese demon, Dean? What on earth is it doing here?"

Dean shrugged. "How would I know? Came over with immigrants or something, beats me."

"Like the scarecrow."

"Yeah, maybe," Dean said. "Looks like it'll be pretty easy to kill, at least."

"There might be more than one, though."

"There is that." Dean rubbed his face. He'd taken three Advil but his headache still hadn't gone away. "So are we scratching out the bear theory? I mean, there could still be a bear. Maybe it was just Ellen who got attacked by this nukekubi thing."  
  
"We still have to kill it," Sam said. "Or them, whatever. The theoretical bear isn't our problem."

Dean sighed. "Yeah. Shit, how the hell are we going to track this thing down? It could be anyone."

"I don't think that'll be a problem," Sam said quietly.

It was possible that Dean was in denial. "Are you _stupid_? That's a terrible idea."

Sam shrugged. "I don't think it'll notice if I scan it. It sounds like these things are only dangerous physically."

"It's a good thing, too, you're probably wide-open to psychic manipulation right now," Dean said.

"I'll be fine," Sam said.

"Whatever." Dean lowered the lid of the computer. "I'm starved, let's go get something to eat."

Sam shook his head. "I'm not hungry."

That was _not_ what Dean wanted to hear. Maybe he was being too optimistic, but he was beyond ready for Sam to start acting normal again. "Okay, what? I thought we figured out what was going on, aren't you supposed to be better now?"

"Look, I don't know, okay! Maybe it doesn't work like that!"

"Maybe something else is going to happen," Dean said.

"Yeah, maybe! How would I know!" Sam was all riled up, his voice getting louder with every word.

"Hey, all right," Dean said, like he was soothing a frightened animal, holding his hands up in front of his chest. "Look, I'll just get you some orange juice or something, okay?"

"You can do whatever you want," Sam said, turning back to his books. He clearly thought the conversation was over.

Dean got up from the table, found his keys and his wallet. He stood there in the middle of the room for a while, waiting for Sam to look up or for the right thing to say to suddenly present itself to him. Nothing came, and Sam went right on ignoring him.

"I'll be back soon," Dean said finally, feeling angry and useless. Sam turned another page. Dean slammed the door behind him when he left.

He bought orange juice, three bottles of it, and more Pepto, and a plastic-wrapped turkey sandwich that looked like it had seen better days. He tried to call Dad but there was no answer, as usual. Dean was wrung out and fed up. He'd thought driving around would calm him down, but instead he just got madder and madder, thinking about Sam and his crazy mood swings and Dean's own inability to do anything about it. He felt like there were about five different people living inside Sam’s head, and he never knew which one he was going to be dealing with at any given moment, and he was fucking sick of it.

He slammed the door again when he got back to the motel room, having managed to work himself into a state. "What do you want, huh?" he snapped at Sam, dropping the grocery bag on the table. "Is there something you want me to do that I'm not doing? Or are you just being a jerk for your own entertainment?"

Sam was in bed with a stack of books. "Where's my orange juice?" he asked.

Dean gritted his teeth. He grabbed a bottle of orange juice out of the bag and threw it onto the bed, probably harder than he needed to, but _God_ , Sam had a graduate degree in making Dean lose his mind. Sam was off his rocker; Dean was going to kill him, that was just all there was to it. He sat down at the table and unwrapped his sandwich, his shoulders and back tense and knotted.

"I'm sorry," Sam said, his voice soft. Dean ignored him and finished his sandwich.

"Dean," Sam said when Dean got up to throw out the plastic wrap, "c'mon. I really am sorry."

Dean had never been able to resist that tone of voice Sam's voice, sad and pleading. He sat down at the foot of the bed and flipped through one of Sam's books, not paying attention to the text, just looking for something to do with his hands.

"There's something wrong with me," Sam said, still sounding subdued.

Dean let out a sharp bark of laughter. "Yeah, no shit."

"No, I'm serious! I keep doing things that I don't – I don't feel like myself. I just. It comes and goes, you know?"

"I'm trying to be patient, Sam, but you're making it awful hard."

"Okay, yeah, I get that." Sam rubbed his forehead. "Just, could you think a little more quietly? You're giving me a headache."

Dean froze. "I thought you said you couldn't read me."

"I _can't_. But you're really projecting right now, it's hard to miss. Just think about the ocean or something."

"The ocean." Jesus.

"Missouri will get me straightened out," Sam said. "Right? You said it yourself."

"She fucking better. Christ, Sam, maybe we should forget the job, just head to Lawrence now."

Sam slid down the bed and started rubbing Dean's shoulders, his hands pressing deep into the muscle. "No. I can hold out for a few days. We need to kill this thing. Just put up with me, okay?"

And really, what choice did Dean have? It wasn't even Sam that he was mad at, not really; he was just so frustrated with the whole situation. He hated not being able to protect Sam. He hated feeling so fucking helpless. And Jesus Christ, this psychic business freaked him out like nothing else.

"Keep rubbing my back and maybe I won't make you walk to Kansas," he said.

Sam laughed, and pressed a kiss to the back of Dean's neck. He was being all sweet now, but Dean didn't trust it. Smart money was on Sam flipping his shit again in under twelve hours. Dean just had to be ready for it.

***

The next morning, they started driving around town so Sam could look into people's heads. Sam was nice as pie in the morning, surly around lunch, and sullen and silent by dinner. There was no sign of whatever had attacked Ellen Blackstone. "Just a headful of bad news," Sam said when Dean prodded him, but wouldn't say anything more specific than that. Dean smoked a lot of cigarettes and concentrated on keeping his head quiet.

Sam went to bed as soon as they got back to the motel room after dinner. He pulled the comforter up over his head and wouldn't answer any of Dean's questions. Dean pressed the heel of his hand into his eye socket and thought about the ocean.

He fell asleep in front of the TV, and woke sometime in the night to the sounds of Sam screaming and flailing around. The lightbulb in one of the floor lamps shattered and the bathroom door slammed shut. Dean was out of his armchair before he realized he was moving. He grabbed Sam's shoulders, shook him, yelled his name.

Sam woke with a gasp. His face was streaked with tears, and he was shivering. "Dean, it's not like that," he said. "I won't mean to."

"I know you don't," Dean said, well-accustomed to Sam's post-dream incoherence. "It's okay."

Sam quieted down, apparently satisfied with Dean's answer. Dean got up to turn off the TV and piss and sweep up the broken glass from the lightbulb. He thought Sam was asleep when he climbed into bed, but Sam rolled over and slid a hand down the back of Dean's boxers.

"Sam, no," Dean murmured.

"Are you going to leave?" Sam asked, leaving his hand splayed across Dean's ass.

Dean almost choked on the irony, but he managed to say, "Of course not." He reached back and wrapped his fingers around Sam's wrist, tugged Sam's hand out of his shorts.

"It's just, you're so mad at me."

"I know you can't help it," Dean said, and meant it. "I'm not going anywhere." He laced his fingers through Sam's. "Now go to sleep."

Sam was all smiles in the morning, pressing up against Dean's back as they brushed their teeth and biting at the nape of his neck. Dean was so on edge he felt like his teeth might rattle their way right out of his mouth.

He spit into the sink. "Knock it off," he said, jabbing an elbow into Sam's stomach. He bent over the sink to rinse his mouth out.

Sam's hands settled on Dean's hips. "God, Dean, I thought you'd gotten over this!"

"You aren't in your right mind," Dean said primly, straightening up and glaring at Sam's reflection in the mirror.

Sam rolled his eyes. "It's not like I'm mentally incompetent. I can still make my own decisions, you know."

"Somehow I doubt that." Dean tried to pull away, but Sam had a good hold on him, and then he dropped a hand to the front of Dean's boxers. Dean was already partway hard, just from the promise in Sam's hands and the damp heat of his breath against the back of Dean's neck. Dean dropped his head and hissed through his teeth as Sam curled his fingers around Dean's cock.

If Dean had been a better person, he would have batted Sam's hands away; he would have meant it when he said no. But he'd known he was going to hell for a long time now, so he just closed his eyes and let his baby brother jerk him off into the sink.

Afterward, he knelt on the tile floor and took Sam's cock all the way down his throat. He tried to pretend that Sam's hands in his hair were tender, that Sam was even one-tenth as in love with him as he was with Sam. It didn't work. Sam was noisy when he came, as always, bucking his hips and feeding senseless moans into the air.

Sam got in the shower. Dean rinsed his own come out of the sink and brushed his teeth again.

Sam's good mood lasted through lunch, when he suddenly yelled at Dean for putting too much ketchup on his fries. Dean got up from the table and went out to chain-smoke in the car, leaving Sam to deal with the check.

"I'm sorry," Sam said when he opened the passenger side door.

"Uh-huh," Dean said, and started the engine.

Sam found the nukekubi that afternoon. They were driving through a run-down commercial section of the city, dollar stores and check advance places sprouting on either side of the road like neon-lined tumors, when Sam said, "Stop the car."

Dean put on his turn signal and pulled into the parking lot of the nearest shopping center. Sam was pale, his forehead wrinkling the way it did when he was in pain. As soon as Dean killed the engine, Sam opened the door and leaned out to vomit onto the pavement.

Shit. "Sammy, you okay?" Dean asked.

Sam spit a few times before he sat up. He snagged the bottle of water Dean was offering and took a long swallow. "Yeah. I found our demon."

The nukekubi was working as a waitress in a Japanese steakhouse. Sam waited in the car, his head down between his knees, while Dean went in to get a good look at the thing – it – her. If Sam hadn't told him to look for her thick necklace, he never would have guessed it was her. She was young, pretty, the sort of girl Dean might – in a different lifetime – have taken out on a few dates, maybe even brought her flowers before he tried to fuck her.

Instead of pretty Japanese demons, though, Dean had Sam, who was sitting sideways on the front seat, feet on the ground outside, puking again. Dean grabbed another water bottle out of the back seat and did his best to wash some of the vomit away.

"I don't feel so good," Sam croaked. He propped his elbows on his knees and cradled his head in his hands.

"I know, baby," Dean said. He rested a hand on the back of Sam's sweaty neck. "You want some more water? Pepto?"

Sam shook his head. "I think I'm done throwing up. Can we just – we need to follow her home, see if there are any more of them."

"No need," Dean said, and grinned. "I asked the busboy what her name is, told him I thought she was cute. She's in the phone book. Looks like she doesn't live too far from here, either."

The nukekubi's house was painted white, with a bright blue door and flower beds lining the front stoop. It looked like every house Dean had wanted to live in as a kid, before he realized that suburbia wasn't all it was cracked up to be. He parked a few doors down.

"There's another one," Sam said.

"Okay," Dean said. "Wait here, I'll go take a look."

Dean went around the back of the house, sticking close to the outer wall and crouching low to avoid the windows. He heard noise from one of the rooms and raised his head slowly, peering in over the windowsill.

There was a guy in the kitchen, young, probably about Dean's age. He was making Kraft macaroni and cheese. God, he looked so normal, but Sam had _said_ … Dean took his EMF reader out and checked it, just to be safe. Every damn light on the thing flashed red.

Dean went back to the car. "All right, Miss Cleo," he said, pulling the door closed. "There's a guy in there. We'll have to come back tonight and get them. They planning on hunting tonight?"

Sam shook his head. "I don't know. I can't get a real reading off them, it's just chaos. They're all messed up inside. It's like a bad dream."

"Well, I guess we'll just have to hope we get lucky," Dean said. Story of his goddamn life.

***

Dean fucking hated stakeouts. He and Dad used to play stupid games, I Spy or Twenty Questions, just to keep themselves from going batshit insane. But Dad wasn't there, and Dean only had Sam, who had drifted right off to sleep, his breath huffing softly out of his slack mouth. Ordinarily Dean would have given him a lot of shit for passing out on a job, but Sam needed all the sleep he could get.

Dean smoked half a pack of cigarettes, ashing out the open window. It was a cool night; he was glad he'd worn his jacket. He finished off half a cup of cold coffee from that morning, even though it definitely made the list of the top ten grossest things he'd ever put in his mouth.

About 11:00, he saw something flash in his peripheral vision, and he whipped his head around in time to see a fucking _floating head_ bobbing across the lawn.

"Sam," he said, and put a hand on Sam's shoulder.

"I'm awake," Sam said, jerking upright.

"One of them just left the house," Dean said.

Sam yawned and rubbed at his eyes. "Where's the other one?"

Dean shrugged. "It might've gone out the back or something. Can you tell if it's still in the house?"

Sam tilted his head to one side like he was listening to something far away. "It's gone," he said after a minute.

"All right, let's do it," Dean said, and turned off the safety on his gun.

The front door wasn't even locked. Dean rolled his eyes. Fucking demons always thought they were invincible.

The inside of the house was dark and still. Dean kept his gun in front of him as he scoped out the first floor, Sam right on his heels. "Dude, quit it," Dean whispered angrily after the third time Sam stepped on the back of his boots.

"Sorry, sorry," Sam whispered.

They found the two headless bodies lying on the floor in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Dean shuddered. "Now that's an unsettling sight."

Sam shrugged. "We've seen worse. Quit being such a girl." He slung his duffel bag off his shoulder. "How are we going to do this?"

"Salt and burn, baby."

"You have such a creative mind, Dean."

"Hey, I stick with what works." Dean unzipped the duffel and pulled out holy water, salt, and gasoline. "Watch the door," he told Sam, and gave both the bodies a thorough dousing before setting them on fire with his lighter.

"Hell, easiest job we've had in months," Dean said as they started down the stairs. "No mess, no fucking around, just in and out – " And then he reared back in surprise as one of the heads flew up at him from the bottom of the stairs, its open mouth full of needle-sharp teeth.

"Holy fuck!" Dean yelled, and raised his gun, but before he could fire a single shot the thing latched on to his right shoulder, its teeth sinking toward bone. Pain shot through his arm and his torso. He flailed around, beating at it with his other hand, but the thing wasn't letting go, it was just working its teeth in deeper, and sweet fancy Jesus what the _hell_ was Sam _doing_ , knitting baby booties?

There was a popping noise, then, and the nukekubi's head exploded into a warm shower of goo that coated the entire upper half of Dean's body. The pressure on his arm vanished. He raised his left hand and wiped globs of blood and brain tissue off of his face.

"You couldn't just shoot it or something?" he asked, because _of course_ Sam would pick the weirdest possible time to develop a new power. Dean rolled his shoulder experimentally and winced. It felt like his arm was about to fall off. Fuck, it was going to be _weeks_ before he was back to normal.

Sam didn't answer. He was just standing there, frozen, his eyes wide, his gun dangling limply at his side.

"Sam," Dean said, his voice sharper than he intended.

"You're okay," Sam said, like he wasn't sure of the answer.

"I'm okay. It fucked me up pretty bad, but you fucked it up worse," Dean said. He bent over and picked up his gun with his good arm.

Sam swallowed audibly, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. "Okay," he repeated.

And _of course_ Sam would decide to continue his mental breakdown as soon as Dean got injured. Dean sighed. "See if there's a towel in that duffel, would you? I don't want to get this shit all over the car."

"The other head," Sam said.

"Whatever, we got the body, it'll die when morning rolls around. I'm not in any shape to go tromping around after it now."

Sam ended up having to drive them back to the motel, because Dean wasn't able to shift gears. Dean was white-knuckled the whole way. Sam was way out there in La-La Land, and Dean didn't trust him not to run a red light or let go of the steering wheel or something equally idiotic.

Dean let Sam deal with cleaning the guns and packing everything back into the trunk. He squelched into the motel room, little flecks of nukekubi dribbling off him onto the carpet. He left his clothes in a heap in the middle of the room. The jeans he managed to get off one-handed, but he couldn't raise his right arm above his head and ended up having to cut his t-shirt off with a knife. His shoulder had stopped bleeding. The flesh was all torn up, raw and ragged, but he had to get it cleaned out before he could bandage it.

He got in the shower and turned the water up as hot as he could take it, and just stood there under the pounding spray until all of the gunk washed off and the water ran clear. He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the side of the shower stall. The front door opened and closed. He heard Sam banging around in the other room.

The bathroom door opened. Dean kept his eyes closed. The shower curtain slid along its rungs, and then Sam was there in the shower with him. Dean could sense the shape of Sam's body, his familiar presence, warm and looming. He kept his eyes closed.

Sam touched gentle fingers to Dean's wounded shoulder. "This looks pretty bad," he said, sounding like himself again instead of the scared little kid he'd been back at the house. "You've still got some teeth in there."

Christ, Dean hadn't even noticed. "Can you get them out?"

"Yeah. Hold still." Dean felt sharp pressure, and a sensation like his skin was separating from the muscle. It was like porcupine needles, except creepy as fuck. He heard a quiet plink as Sam dropped the tooth.

"Are you just gonna let that wash down the drain?" he asked.

"It doesn't matter," Sam said. He pulled out another tooth, and another.

Dean turned his head so that the side of his face was resting against the fiberglass. Sam's hands left him, and then came back with a bar of soap. Dean felt like he was in a trance. His shoulder was throbbing. He leaned backward into Sam, letting his brother support his weight as Sam ran the soap all over Dean's body, cleaning away the last traces of demon goo.

"That better?" Sam murmured. Dean heard him set the soap down.

"Yeah," Dean said. He wanted to sleep for about two years.

Sam's soapy hands dropped down between Dean's legs, palming his balls with one hand and stroking the skin right behind them with the other, and then trailing further back, fingers teasing at Dean's entrance.

Dean's eyes snapped open. "Sam. What are you doing."

"It should be obvious," Sam said, his voice deep and rough, and he pushed the tip of his index finger inside Dean's body.

"I'm too fucking tired for this," Dean said, but he shivered anyway.

Sam pulled his hands away and ran them up Dean's abdomen, tracing the line of hair leading down from his navel. "Dean, please," he murmured, and Dean couldn't say no, he didn't know how, the words weren't in his vocabulary.

So Dean didn't say anything at all, and he didn't say anything when one of Sam's hands went back between his legs. He didn't want it – didn't want Sam like this, fucked up and psychic and clearly not in control of himself; but _Sam_ wanted it, and Dean would do anything for his brother, anything at all, he would cut out his own fucking heart if Sam asked him to.

Sam fumbled around with the soap, and then he was pressing two fingers into Dean, careful and slow, curving them just right. Dean shifted his hips, spread his legs apart a little.

"Yeah, see? It's good, you like it," Sam said, his breath warm against Dean's ear. He pulled his fingers out and turned off the water. Dean shivered in the sudden chill, feeling shocky from the pain in his shoulder and from the way Sam's left hand was still cupping his balls. He realized with a start that he was hard, his cock throbbing between his legs.

Sam helped him out of the shower, sweet as you please, and dried him off with one of the thick white motel towels. Dean let himself be led into the other room and lowered down onto the bed. It was fine. Sam would do this and then they could sleep, and in the morning they would leave for Kansas.

"God, Dean, look at you," Sam said, standing at the foot of the bed and lazily stroking his cock. He kneed his way onto the bed and hovered over Dean on all fours. "You have to start being more careful," he whispered, his mouth inches from Dean's.

Dean fisted his left hand in Sam's hair and closed the last few millimeters between them, licking his way into Sam's mouth, grunting at the slick glide of Sam's tongue against his.

Sam's kisses were hot and rough, but his hands were gentle, stroking down Dean's stomach and brushing over his injured shoulder. He smelled like soap and fabric softener, and he tasted like old coffee. Dean sucked on Sam's upper lip, hungry for it suddenly, wanting nothing else in the world but Sam's mouth on his own.

Sam pulled back and slid a hand beneath Dean's thigh, pressing his leg back toward his chest. He licked at Dean's nipples and the fat scar on his belly, slid his tongue into Dean's navel, moved lower. At the first touch of Sam's tongue to his balls, Dean closed his eyes, panting harshly. "Yeah," he said, "Sam, yeah."

Sam chuckled, his tongue following the same path his fingers had traced earlier, licking the stretch of skin behind Dean's balls and then further back, fluttering against Dean's hole – God – right where he wanted it, charting out wet circles. Dean shifted his hips, his body begging for it, and Sam gave it to him, pressing his tongue _in_ , fucking Dean with his mouth, and Dean had to reach down and grab his balls to keep from coming.

When Sam resurfaced, he was grinning.

"God, fuck you," Dean gasped, "you asshole, don't stop – "

"Hey," Sam said, reaching into the drawer of the bedside table, "I've got you." He bent down and kissed Dean, and Dean could taste himself on Sam's tongue, and the moan he'd been holding back came bubbling out of his mouth.

Sam took his sweet time lubing up, and Dean clawed at his back in impatience, but Sam finally got his act together and shouldered his way beneath Dean's legs, and then the head of his cock was nudging against Dean's ass and he sunk all the way in with one slow thrust.

Dean rolled his head back on the pillow, gasping for air. His shoulder jostled with every motion of Sam's hips, and it hurt, but he didn't even care anymore, he wanted all of it, everything Sam would give him. He pushed his hips up to meet Sam's, trying to set the rhythm, but Sam wouldn't let him.

"God, _harder_ ," Dean said, but Sam didn't speed up, just kept up the same even pace, rocking his pelvis against Dean's, his flat belly rubbing against Dean's cock.

Dean bit at Sam's sweaty shoulder, tasting salt. He ran his good arm down Sam's back and grabbed at his ass, trying to make him go faster, desperate for it, his cock almost painfully hard.

"I thought you were going to die," Sam gasped. "I was so scared, I was – "

Dean had learned a long time ago not to pay attention to any of Sam's sex babble. He slid two fingers into Sam's mouth to shut him up, and Sam sucked hard on them, running his tongue along the ragged edge of Dean's nails.

Dean could hear himself panting, loud and needy. He was almost there, the movement of Sam's body working him up to a fever pitch, and then Sam slipped a hand between their bodies and grabbed Dean's cock, and that was all it took: just a few strokes of Sam's callused hand, and Dean was shaking and bucking his hips and coming, and Sam was coming with him, babbling nonsense. And _Christ_ it was good, it was always good, but it was never enough.

Sam pressed a kiss to Dean's mouth and rolled off him, flopping down onto his back. Dean's shoulder hurt. He turned his head and saw that the wounds had opened again and there were bloodstains on the pillow.

"Oh my God, Dean," Sam said, sounding horrified, and Dean looked over at his brother. He was staring at Dean's shoulder. "I don't – I didn't mean to – "

Dean sat up, grabbed Sam's arm with his good hand. "Shut up, Sam, I wanted to. It was good."

"It's not okay, Dean! Look at your shoulder! I should have bandaged it for you, I shouldn't have – you didn't want to – "

"I could have stopped you if I really wanted to," Dean said quietly.

Sam buried his face in his hands. "I don't know what's happening to me," he said.

Dean lost his temper, just like that. "Shut the fuck up and get the first aid kit," he snapped, furious with Sam for refusing to deal with the consequences of his actions, for acting like his freaky psychic powers meant he didn't have to follow the rules of human interaction anymore.

Sam got off the bed and crept over to their bags. Dean stared at the ceiling. There was a water stain right over his head, brown and ugly. It looked kind of like a moth.

"Can you sit up a little?" Sam asked, sitting on the edge of the bed. His voice was so soft Dean could barely hear him.

Dean levered himself up on his good elbow and leaned back against the headboard. Sam dabbed his shoulder with iodine and Neosporin and covered it with gauze and tape. Dean stared down at his soft cock, his knobbly toes. His second toe was longer than any of the others. He wondered what it meant.

"You'll need to keep your arm in a sling for a while," Sam said.

"I figured," Dean said. He went into the bathroom and peed into the sink, too lazy to lift the toilet seat. Sam hovered in the doorway. Dean ignored him and went back into the other room, crawled into bed. He watched as Sam shut them in for the night: laid down a salt line in front of the door, re-traced the protective sigils on the walls, turned off all the lights.

Sam got in bed. He was shaking. Dean sighed and pulled Sam close to him, cradling Sam's head against his left shoulder. The anger had drained out of him. His limbs felt heavy.

"I'm sorry," Sam mumbled. He mouthed at Dean's collarbone. "I'm sorry."

Dean ran his hand through Sam's hair. "It's okay, Sammy. It's fine. We'll leave for Lawrence tomorrow, go see Missouri. It's all gonna be okay."

Saying the words, Dean realized that he believed it. The last few weeks had been awful, and the whole nukekubi business had been sheer hell on earth, but they were going to get Sam some help. Lying there in bed, holding on to Sam, Dean was convinced that things were going to work out. Sam would be back to normal soon, and then they could get on with their lives.

He didn't have any dreams that night. He slept until 10:00 the next morning, and when he woke up, Sam was gone.

***

**June – August 2007**  
He didn't call his dad until the third day after Sam went missing, after he had already turned over every fucking rock in Yakima. Dad wasn't answering his phone, though. Dean left a message; nothing urgent, just giving him a heads-up.

There were no traces of EMF in the room, which wasn't surprising: the sigils they'd traced on the walls had protected them against hundreds of crazy-ass creatures in dozens of states. Still, it _had_ to be something supernatural – the salt line in front of the door was undisturbed; there was no way Sam had just walked out of that motel room – but Dean had never heard of anything that could bust through all their layers of defensive magic. He spent days doing research anyway, digging through all their books and scouring the internet, but he couldn't find anything. No creature that anybody had ever heard of could have snatched Sam out of that room. Dean didn't have any clues.

He went the mundane route. All he could hope for was that somebody, somewhere, had seen Sam and might know where he was. He started calling in favors, contacting Dad's friends, even emailing some of Sam's friends from Stanford in a fit of desperation. He couldn't talk to the authorities himself, being dead and all, but he paid a homeless lady fifty bucks to file a Missing Person, and one of his dad's friends got in touch with the FBI. He threw caution to the wind and posted pictures of Sam all over the internet. He drove to Seattle, to Portland, drove all around eastern Washington, handing out flyers, asking questions, bugging the hell out of everyone he saw.

He heard nothing. Dean kept his ear to the ground, searched nonstop for two months, and there was nothing. Not a word, not a hint of Sam's presence.

"Son, maybe it's time you let it go," his dad's friend Randy told him over the phone, near the end of the second month.

"He isn't dead," Dean ground out, but three weeks later he was exhausted and so jumpy that a car door slamming was enough to make him reach for his gun. There was nothing else he could do.

His dad still wasn't answering his phone. "Dad, it's me," Dean said when the voice mail picked up. "Uh, I'm pretty sure Sammy's dead, I just wanted to – " He hung up then, disgusted by the sound of his voice cracking.

He went to a bar that night and drank until he blacked out. He woke up in the motel room the next morning, passed out bare-ass naked on the bathroom floor, without a clue as to how he got there. He took a shower and walked down the street to buy a bottle of vodka, the real shitty kind, so cheap it was like drinking paint thinner.

A week later, he woke up sober and dehydrated. Dad had left him a voice mail: he sounded awful, his voice gone ragged; he said he couldn't find anything. He asked Dean to meet him in Albuquerque. Dean listened to the message twice and deleted it.

He didn't want to leave Yakima. It was the last place he'd seen Sam, and some dumb part of him still hoped that Sam might just stroll up to the motel room door one day. But his options were basically to either stick around until he died of boredom and bad food, or get back on the road. Dean knew about grief. His mom's death hadn't killed him, and Sam's death wouldn't either, even though it sure felt like it might.

He didn't go to Albuquerque. He got on the internet and found a series of suspicious deaths in a small town in Iowa that looked like there was some sort of land curse involved. There was still work to be done. Dean's life had never been about choices: he did the next thing that came to him, and the next one after that. Maybe it wasn't the best way to live, or the smartest, but it was what he knew.

He headed out that afternoon.


	2. Chapter 2

**PART TWO  
** May 2006 – January 2007  
Their first year on the road together started out rough. They didn't know anything about each other anymore. Two years without speaking had changed both of them, probably not for the better. Sam had turned into a stranger, and Dean didn't have the first clue what to say to him.

By early summer, though, Sam had mellowed out, smiled more, was more the way Dean remembered him being before he went off to Stanford. He told dumb jokes a lot and read comic strips out loud over breakfast. They learned how to hunt together again, and more than that, how to live together in a series of shitty motels in shitty small towns without acting like the Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat.

As Sam got happier, though, Dean got more and more surly. He couldn't explain it. Sam was patient with him for longer than Dean expected, but he finally lost it outside Memphis in late July, after Dean had been passive-aggressively picking at him all morning. Dean calmly tapped the ash off his cigarette into Sam's half-empty coffee cup, and that was apparently the last straw.

"Look, Dean, I don't know what your problem is!" Sam yelled. "I don't know what you want from me, but you're really starting to piss me off!"

Dean thought about all the things he could say to that: _I want you to stay with me_ or _I want you to admit that you were born to do this_ or any of the other ten billion things he wanted to tell Sam on a daily basis but didn't.

"I want you to shut the fuck up while I'm driving," he said instead, as if that was any sort of answer.

"I'm going to murder you in your sleep," Sam said, folding his arms and scowling out the window. He wouldn't speak to Dean all day, until Dean – feeling like a huge asshole – ordered pizza for dinner, with green peppers and mushrooms and pineapple, just the way Sam liked it.

"You still need to quit being such a jerk," Sam said around a mouthful of pizza.

"Uh-huh," Dean said, picking all the pineapple off his slice. He wasn't making any promises.

It wasn't until the end of August, when classes started again at Stanford and Sam was helping Dean take out a vampire in Mississippi instead of moving into a dorm room or whatever, that he realized he'd been waiting for the other shoe to drop for the last nine months. He didn't ask Sam why he wasn't going back to school, afraid he would jinx it. Sam didn't volunteer any information.

Things got better after that. In September, Dean decided they needed a break, and they spent a week in an abandoned farmhouse in Iowa. They strung a hammock up between two old oak trees, and Dean spent hours lying in it, dozing on and off, while Sam splashed around in the pond behind the house. By the end of that week, Dean's freckles were thick across the bridge of his nose, and Sam had turned brown all over.

In October, a ghoul flung Sam into a wall and he fractured three ribs. In November, they drove to California so Sam could visit Jess's grave. They were in Boston for most of December, tracking down a ring of psychotic necromancers.

Sam flung one of the necromancers into a wall, using his _brain_ , so Dean put his foot down and they holed up in a motel for a week and tried to figure out what the hell was going on. Sam hadn't shown any signs of telekinesis since Max, just the visions and nightmares, and Dean was freaked the fuck out, wondering why it had cropped up again.

"I can't control it, okay!" Sam snapped, exasperated, after Dean spent two hours trying to get him to bend a spoon in half.

"Well, that's gonna be a problem, Sammy, because what if you end up putting a knife through my forehead in the middle of the night?"

"It hasn't happened yet."

Dean rolled his eyes. "Yeah, but it _might_."

" _Fine_ ," Sam said. "I hate you. Give me the spoon."

It didn't happen that day, or the next, but Sam finally managed to twist the handle of the spoon up to touch the head of it, so that it formed a circle.

"You happy now?" he asked, tossing it onto the bed next to Dean.

"Thrilled. Gimme a kiss, big boy," Dean said without thinking, and then winced. Sam's eyes dropped to Dean's mouth.

"Maybe later," Sam said. Dean looked away and turned up the volume on the TV.

That was the moment things changed between them. Dean caught Sam watching him a lot, a speculative look on his face. In January, Sam kissed him in a basement in Tuscaloosa, right after Dean was almost eviscerated by a roving ghoul.

Dean shoved him away. "What the fuck, Sam."

And Sam looked so fucking _puzzled_ , like he had no idea why Dean was upset. "C'mon, man, I was just – "

"You were not just!" Dean shouted, pointing a finger right in Sam's face. "We are not starting this up again!"

They drove back to the motel in silence. Dean felt like he was about to shake right out of his own skin. He'd been doing his goddamn best to keep their lives as normal as possible, keep his fucking hands to himself, make Sam want to stay; and now Sam was trying to ruin it, and Dean wanted to throttle him. He went through half a pack of cigarettes by the time he pulled the car into the parking lot.

It was way past midnight. Dean stripped down to his boxers and wandered around turning off the lights and checking the lock on the window.

Sam came inside, duffel slung over his shoulder. Dean cast him a suspicious glance and went into the bathroom to clean the shallow claw marks on his belly. Nothing too serious, but they stung like a bitch.

"Sam, where's the iodine!" he hollered.

Sam came into the bathroom with the iodine bottle in one hand. "Let me do it," he said.

"It's fine, I got it," Dean said, holding his hand out for the bottle.

Sam wouldn't give it to him, though. "Hold still," he said, and swiped roughly at the cuts with an iodine-soaked cotton ball. Dean winced at the sting and tried to edge away, but Sam grabbed his shoulder and held him in place.

"There," Sam said finally, setting the bottle and cotton ball next to the sink, but he left his hand on Dean's shoulder. Dean felt like the whole world had stopped in its tracks and was waiting to see what happened next.

What happened was Sam bent his head and pressed an open-mouthed kiss to Dean's neck, right below the ear, his tongue making little forays over the skin there.

Dean jerked like he'd been shot. He wrenched his body away, held up one hand to ward Sam off. "This wasn't okay when you were seventeen, and it isn't okay now," he barked, so furious with Sam for forcing the issue, for making Dean _think_ about it and _want_ it again.

Sam was pale and a little wild-eyed, standing there with his arms hanging uselessly at his sides. "Dean. You're all I've got."

"Yeah, exactly. That's the problem."

"Please, Dean, I need – "

Dean smacked his hand against the doorframe. "Oh yeah? And what about what _I_ need? What am I gonna do when you walk away from this in a year, two years, whenever - you said it yourself, you aren't going to do this forever. And where does that leave me?"

Sam didn't seem to have an answer to that. He just stood there, chewing on his lower lip, at a loss for words for once in his life.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," Dean said. "Go to sleep."

The next morning in the car, Sam said, "Can you honestly tell me you're happy like this? That hunting is all you ever want to do?"

"Yeah," Dean said automatically, not even sure if it was true.

***

**January – June 2001**  
They rented a house the winter Dean turned twenty-two, so Sam could finish off his last semester of high school in one place. That argument held the record as the biggest Dad vs. Sam fight of all time for a paltry six months, when it was toppled by the Stanford fight, which was like Godzilla devouring the unsuspecting Tokyo of Dean's happy family life.

That was the year Dean started smoking. Dad wasn't happy about it, said he needed to be able to run and fight, but Dean figured he was fucked anyway, and if some demon ate him because he was too slow, well, there were worse ways to make an exit.

But that wasn't until later, after Sam had already left. That last winter and spring with Sam, Dad was gone most of the time on jobs, and Sam and Dean had the crappy rental house all to themselves. Sam went to school. Dean looked after Sam and worked nights at the 7-11 down the street. The job sucked, but he spent most of his shift reading porn mags behind the counter. It put food on the table, anyway.

He and Sam started sleeping together in March. It had been coming for a long time, but Dean forgot how to say _no_ right around the time the crocuses bloomed. They didn't talk about it. Sam would slip into Dean's bed some nights, and some nights not; there was no pattern to it. It was easy and sweet and uncomplicated. Sam kissed him like they had all the time in the world, and Dean let himself believe that they did.

Sam never came right out and said it, but Dean was pretty sure the sex was part of the reason why he left. Maybe not the main part, or even a big part, but still. Dean spent months wondering if Sam would have stuck around if Dean had managed to keep his hands to himself.

But that spring, when Dean was still busy convincing himself that Sam would stay, he was the happiest he could remember being since Mom died. He had a hard time forgiving Sam for taking away that feeling he'd had, a weightlessness like a door had opened inside his chest and all the cobwebs and dirt were being cleared away.

***

**February 2007**  
Dean held out until halfway through February, which he was pretty sure qualified him for sainthood.

Sam was a belligerent motherfucker, and he knew where all of Dean's buttons were and exactly how hard to push them. He started sleeping naked for the first time in his life and acted like there was nothing strange about parading around in the morning with everything just _right there_ for the whole world to see. It made Dean insane. Sam would wander out of the bathroom, toweling his hair dry, and it took every ounce of Dean's self-control to keep from falling to his knees and licking the water out of Sam's navel.

In a diner in Wisconsin, Sam ordered a fruit plate for breakfast. "Mm, the cantaloupe's really good," he said. "You want a piece?"

"Sure," Dean said absently, flipping through the local newspaper.

"Here," Sam said.

"Just put it on my plate, dude."

"No," Sam said, and Dean looked up at that, because what? Sam was holding out the cantaloupe, an expectant look on his face.

"You have got to be kidding me," Dean said, and made a grab for the cantaloupe, but Sam pulled it out of reach, grinning.

"C'mon, Dean," Sam said, his voice dropping low, and goddammit, he was doing that on purpose. Dean scowled. He tried to stare Sam down, but Sam wasn't budging, he just sat there holding the cantaloupe in his long fingers, looking incredibly pleased with himself.

If Sam wanted to play dirty – hell, Dean had _invented_ dirty. He leaned forward and ate the cantaloupe out of Sam's hand, nibbling at the tips of Sam's fingers and sucking them into his mouth. Instead of yanking away, though, Sam turned his hand over and stroked the ridges on the roof of Dean's mouth and, okay, that was enough.

Dean pulled back. "Tasty," he said, trying to hide exactly how affected he was by the vaguely spicy flavor of Sam's skin and by how dark and wide Sam's pupils had gotten. Jesus. Dean tapped his fork on the table. The old lady at the next table was staring at them.

Watching TV one night, Sam pulled Dean's feet into his lap gave him a foot rub that was probably illegal in thirty-seven states, tracing the delicate skin between Dean's toes and running his nails along the arches until Dean levered himself off the couch and went to smoke and jerk off in the car. It was embarrassing, was what it was. Dean felt like he was a teenager again, no self-control, horny all the time, waking up in the middle of the night because he was humping his pillow. Fuck, Dean was _twenty-eight_ , he was supposed to be over that shit.

In mid-February, they were working a case in one of those flat, endless plains states that Dean could never tell apart – just your run-of-the-mill poltergeist, nothing out of the ordinary. It was an easy exorcism, and they were back at the motel by 9:00 that night. Dean settled down in one of the armchairs to watch some TV.

Sam went into the bathroom to take a shower. He was in there for a long time after the water cut off. Dean didn't pay it much mind, too wrapped up in the cop show he was watching. But he looked up when the door opened and Sam came into the room, bare-ass naked. Dean scowled and quickly looked back at the TV.

"Hey," Sam said. He stood right in front of Dean, blocking the screen, and Dean did his fucking best to keep his eyes unfocused, but Sam was larger than life and, Christ, very clearly turned on, the tip of his cock already wet.

"Oh God," Dean breathed, his mouth watering.

Sam climbed into the armchair and straddled Dean's lap, wriggling around until he was pressed right up against Dean, his cock leaving sticky patterns on Dean's shirt. Dean's hands shot up of their own accord, hovering uncertainly in front of Sam's chest, ready to shove him away or pull him closer. He wasn't even sure which.

"Don't push me away," Sam murmured. He bent his head to press a kiss to the corner of Dean's mouth.

"Sam, we can't," Dean said, but he let his hands drop down to rest on Sam's splayed thighs.

"I know you want to. _I_ want to, okay? You aren't forcing me or whatever it is you're worrying about." Sam kissed the other corner of Dean's mouth. Dean twisted his head away. He was hard inside his jeans, so hungry for it, completely overwhelmed by his desire for Sam's body and his wide smile and his stupid floppy hair.

"We can't," Dean repeated, unable to put into words all the things that went unspoken between them.

"Shut up," Sam said, and kissed Dean full-on, wet and languid, leaving the imprint of his teeth in Dean's lower lip. And Dean gave up, then, just surrendered utterly, grinding his hips up into Sam's, gritting his teeth at how good it felt.

"Yeah, come on," Sam said, and started working on Dean's belt buckle.

Dean slid his hands up Sam's thighs to his hips, holding on to the curve of bone there. Sam popped Dean's button fly, not even bothering to push his jeans down, just spreading the denim apart, and wrapped his enormous hand around Dean's cock.

"Holy shit," Dean gasped, thrusting up into Sam's grasp. He was going to hell and he didn't care at all, not as long as Sam kept squeezing him just right and rolling his thumb over the head.

"I want you to fuck me," Sam said, tonguing Dean's earlobe.

Dean's cock twitched, and he shuddered. He slid one hand around between Sam's legs, his fingers probing, and _Jesus fucking Christ_ Sam was already slick and open, and the thought of exactly what Sam had been doing in that bathroom almost sent Dean to an early grave.

"Push up a little," Dean rasped, and Sam raised his hips and then sank down onto Dean's cock, one smooth motion until his ass was resting right against Dean's thighs.

And shit he was tight, and hot, and Dean was not going to survive this. He slid a hand behind Sam's neck, pulling him down into a messy kiss, and Sam started moving his hips in tight little circles, gasping into Dean's mouth, teasing himself on Dean's cock.

"Fuck," Dean breathed, his fingers tight on Sam's hips, and he thrust into Sam _hard_. Sam was so far gone already, his pupils dilated, and he moved raggedly against Dean, mouthing wetly at Dean's neck.

"Come on, come on, I want it, give it to me, Dean, _Dean_ ," Sam babbled, and ground his hips down one more time, and then he was coming all over Dean's shirt, thrashing around and throwing his head back, his face contorted with it.

Dean's hips snapped up helplessly, rapid-fire, his coordination disintegrating, and he spilled into Sam's body, everything gone except the electricity crackling up and down his spine and Sam's face pressed against the side of his neck.

It was a long time before either of them moved. Sam shifted finally, pulled off of Dean and stood up. "Oh my _God_ ," he groaned, drawn-out and melodramatic, stretching his arms over his head until something in his back popped.

"You said it," Dean agreed. The guilt was starting to set in again. He tucked himself back into his boxers and buttoned up his jeans, watching the shifting muscles in Sam's back as he ambled into the bathroom. Dean's shirt was a mess. He stripped it off and threw it toward the laundry pile. It didn't quite make it. He leaned his head against the back of the armchair and closed his eyes.

"Hey," Sam said, close by. Dean cracked one eye open. Sam was bending over him, still buck-ass naked, looking well-fucked and happy. He leaned in for a kiss. "Quit worrying," he said when he pulled back. "I'm here for now."

"What about next year," Dean said.

Sam shrugged. "I don't know. We could both be _dead_ by this time next year; God, Dean, since when do you care about planning that far in advance? Can't we just take it as it comes?"

"No," Dean said, just to be contrary.

"You are the biggest pain in the ass I've ever met."

"I live to serve," Dean said. He wanted Sam so bad he could taste it, the sour flavor of longing in the back of his mouth.

"I want it too, you know," Sam said, and okay, that was just uncanny.

Dean got out of the chair and went to stand by the window, looking out at the cars parked in the darkened lot. The Impala was out there, asleep like a faithful dog. Dean wanted to get in it and drive off, far away from Sam, who was going to spend the rest of his life trying to break Dean's pathetic little heart.

Sam came up and stood behind him, not touching him at all, just breathing on the back of his neck. "You know, even if I leave again, it won't be forever," Sam said quietly. "I don't want to stop speaking to you again. I was miserable for the whole two years."

It was something they never talked about, that fight or the aftermath, when Dean had gone to visit Sam at Stanford and they'd fucked on Sam's narrow dorm bed, and then Sam freaked out and yelled a lot and told Dean to never come back.

Dean dropped his gaze to where his hands were clutching at the windowsill. He swallowed hard. If he started things with Sam again, he didn't think he could stop – but Sam would be able to stop in a heartbeat, it wouldn't be a problem for him at all. Dean was tired of being the one who needed it too much and got shafted.

"I just want a normal life," Dean said, throwing Sam's own words back at him. "Fucking your brother isn't normal."

"That was more than three years ago!" Sam said.

"So what?" Dean said.

"So things have changed since then. _I've_ changed, I've changed my mind. I want you to trust me," Sam said, and he was being so earnest and open, and Dean was desperate to believe him. He was a fucking idiot and he deserved whatever horrible things would come out of this, but he turned around anyway and kissed Sam again and again.

They slept in the same bed that night, limbs tangled and sweaty; and the next night; and the night after that. Dean re-learned all the contours of Sam's mouth. He felt like he was falling into it, into Sam, descending to a place he would never rise from again. He liked it. It was easy to stop resisting and just go along with all of Sam's impulses. Sam kept smiling; he laughed with his mouth open, wide and shining, like he meant every word he whispered to Dean in the early hours of the morning. Everything else was insignificant.

And yeah, maybe Sam would leave some day, maybe he'd get married and settle down and do all that suburbia bullshit, and Dean would miss him until the end of the world. And maybe Dean would look back and wonder what he could have done differently; maybe in hindsight he'd think things would have been better if he had stayed with Cassie or gotten the breakfast burrito instead of the pancakes or _whatever_.

He tried not to worry about it too much. He'd settled his bets as best he could. Things would work out or they wouldn't; and besides, Dean knew that life wasn't about being happy. It was just about making it through.

 

 

* * *

 

**PART THREE  
** August – December 2007  
The job in Iowa was easy. He barely had to think about it: his hands laid out salt lines, traced sigils, didn't waver. Dean felt like he was swimming in deep water. Every time he looked up toward the surface, the world beyond was blurry, undefined.

He kept his cell phone turned off. Dad left him message after message, each one sounding more desperate, until Dean stopped listening to them altogether and deleted them as soon as they arrived. He didn't know why. He couldn't think. His lungs were filled with fluid, he was drowning.

After Iowa, he went to Pennsylvania, and then up to Vermont for what turned out to be a rabid dog. Every town looked the same. Dean kept his guns clean and his gas tank full. A girl in Buffalo smiled at him in a bar and he didn't realize it until later that night, lying awake after a dream. She'd been real pretty: brown hair, blue eyes, exactly Dean's type.

He bought a CD on a whim in Tulsa, some band called Saves the Day. It was a waste of fifteen bucks: the Impala only had a tape deck, and Dean didn't own a CD player. He left the CD in the motel room when he left.

In Montana, at the end of October, he finally called his dad.

"Dean," Dad said. "My God, I thought I'd never hear from you again."

"I'm sorry," Dean said. "It was just – after – I couldn't."

"I want you to come down here for a few days."

"Okay," Dean said, tired of making his own way, ready to just let his dad take care of things for a while.

Dad was in some crappy little town in Arkansas – Dean forgot the name as soon as he heard it. It took him three days to make the drive. His dad came out of the motel room when Dean pulled into the parking lot, and hauled Dean into a hug as soon as he got out of the car. Dean held on tight, digging his fingers into Dad's shirt.

They pulled apart eventually. "I'm glad you're here," Dad said.

"Yeah," Dean said, "me too."

They went to a bar: one of those shitty run-down places that grow like weeds in every small town in the country. His dad handed him a shot glass and Dean knocked it back without even checking to see what it was. It burned going down. He signaled the bartender for another.

"You didn't find anything," Dean said, already knowing the answer but wanting to be sure.

Dad looked down at the surface of the bar, rolling his beer bottle between his hands. "No. I've been checking everywhere, Dean, believe me. He's gone."

"Yeah," Dean said, "I know."

Dean got shit-faced drunk and Dad had to haul him back to the motel and put him in bed. "He left me," Dean mumbled as Dad put water and aspirin on the nightstand, "that little bastard just up and left me behind."

"Go to sleep, Dean," Dad said gently.

It was almost noon by the time Dean woke up the next day, hung over as all get-out and feeling like he was about three thousand years old. Dad had left him an Egg McMuffin and a note saying he'd be back by dinner time.

Dean ate the sandwich, showered, tried to jerk off but wasn't all that interested, watched re-runs of The Real World. He felt sluggish, indifferent. It was hard to move. He fell asleep in front of the TV and didn't wake up until Dad came back from whatever it was he'd been doing.

"How are you feeling?" Dad asked, locking the door behind him and tossing the keys onto the table.

"Fine," Dean said. He didn't want to talk, and Dad didn't push it. They were good at edging around each other's issues, at leaving things unsaid. It was probably why they'd always gotten along so well.

Dad had brought back a couple bags of groceries, and he made sandwiches on the hot plate, stuffed with cooked vegetables and melted cheese. Dean ate two.

"Your cooking's gotten better," Dean said, remembering years of Chef Boyardee and Hamburger Helper.

"Live and learn," Dad said.

Dean went to bed right after dinner, even though he'd slept all day, and didn't wake up until sunrise the next morning. He was useless. He shuffled across the street to buy cigarettes at one point, but other than that, he didn't leave the room all day. He and Dad played Scrabble in the evening. Dean lost.

Dad took care of him. Dean felt guilty about it, knowing that Dad needed... that Dad was drinking too much and sleeping not nearly enough, grieving for... going through some hard times. But Dean had forgotten to be an adult somewhere along the line, and he just ate lots of fast food and let his daddy make all the decisions for a while.

Dad let him mope around the motel room for three more days, but on the fourth day he said, "There's a job needs doing in Tennessee. You feel up to taking it on?"

And Jesus, all of a sudden Dean couldn't _wait_ to be back on the road, actually _doing_ something with himself instead of living in this miserable Arkansas motel purgatory. "Yeah," he said. "Tell me the details."

The job was hard; not the hardest Dean had ever done, but hard enough. One of the harpies got away from him, and he spent ten days tracking it down. It kept him busy. Then there was another job, and another one. Dad started calling him once a week, just to check in. Dean made sure to keep his phone turned on.

In Delaware, he got the shit beat out of him by a cranky wraith, and he had to go to the emergency room because he couldn't suture his own right arm. The doctors were suspicious, and the paperwork lady gave him a lot of shit about his insurance, and Dean was in an awful mood by the time he finally got out of there.

If Sam hadn't gone and gotten himself killed, Dean could have avoided the hospital entirely. He disobeyed every rule of good driving on the way back to the motel, suddenly _furious_ with Sam for breaking all of his promises, except Sam hadn't ever made any promises, not really, which just made it that much worse.

Fuck Sam, anyway. Dean didn't need him. He'd hunted by himself for four years while Sam was away at Stanford, fucking sorority girls or smoking weed or whatever it was college boys did. Dean wouldn't know.

In Denver, Dean decided to quit smoking. Sam had bugged him about it all the time, so Dean would get his revenge by quitting now that Sam couldn't act all smug about it. He went cold-turkey, and spent a week thinking he was going to die, but he made it through. He started keeping a bag of Dum Dums in the car, just to be safe.

He stayed angry through ten states and three jobs. Then he picked up a girl in a bar in Nebraska and fucked her in the back seat of the Impala. She was pale all over and had a wide, flickering smile, and while she rode him she rubbed her palms over her nipples and moaned.

Dean lay there and hated himself, and hated her, and hated Sam. He draped an arm over his eyes so he wouldn't have to see her flush all over as she worked herself to two shuddering orgasms on his cock.

He didn't look at her when he came, or afterward, when she stripped the condom off him and tossed it out into the parking lot, or when she pulled on her clothes and left.

"I hope you saw that, you bastard," Dean said as he drove back to the motel. The world was quiet around him, echoing, full of empty white space. Nobody answered.

Things were harder after that, but in a good way, like peeling off a scab and having to be careful of that pink skin for a while, but knowing that it would toughen up eventually. Maybe there would be a scar, but at least it wouldn't be so tender and sore all the time. Dean let himself be aware of the space Sam's body would have occupied on the passenger side of the car. He hauled Sam's duffel out of the trunk and went through it, rearranged things, move some stuff over to his own bag.

Doing laundry in Georgia in late November, Dean found one of Sam's shirts mixed in with his. He folded it and set it aside, then changed his mind and stacked in on top of his own clothes. It was only a little too big, after all. He could just roll up the sleeves.

That same month, he started having dreams. At first, he didn't remember them after he woke up, but sometimes a road sign or a certain angle of light would give him déjà vu so strong his head reeled. It bugged the hell out of him.

After a week or two, he started recalling things: just an image here and there, a circle of salt, an old brick building with a metal fence around it. He didn't know what any of it meant – if it _did_ mean anything and wasn't just random things firing off in his brain.

He dreamed about Sam one night. His brother was talking to him, but Dean couldn't hear a word of what he was saying. Dean tried to lip-read, but he was shit at it. He grew more and more frustrated, and finally yelled, "I can't hear you, Sam! Goddammit!" Sam smiled hugely at that, as if it was exactly the right thing for Dean to say, the one thing Sam had been waiting to hear, and then he disappeared.

Dean was unsettled for the whole day after that, twitching at every sound and every flicker of motion in his peripheral vision, like he was expecting Sam to materialize out of thin air. He wasn't going to, of course. That was just ridiculous. But God, that dream had been so _real_ , it was like Sam had really been there.

Late in December, Dean surfaced gasping from yet another dream. The sheets were soaked with sweat. He fumbled for the lamp switch. There was a pen and a notepad in the drawer of the nightstand; Dean grabbed them and sketched frantically, not even sure what he was drawing until it was finished. It looked like some sort of protective sigil. He turned the pad around in his hands, trying to remember where he'd seen it before –

– And then he _knew_ , and he rolled out of bed and started throwing things into his duffel. It was 5:30 in the morning, probably not too early to check out. He could make it to Boston in less than a day, and then – and then –

He felt hope starting to nibble at a corner of his heart, like a fucking rat. He let it.

***

Dean had had two run-ins with Jeremiah Woolridge: the first time in the spring of 2002, when Jeremiah was running a small-time fortune-telling scam out of his basement in South Boston; and again that past December, a year ago, when Jeremiah had reinvented himself as a deranged necromancer and started kissing asses until he was accepted into a circle.

They'd killed Jeremiah's fellow psychos for good, but Jeremiah had gotten lucky and almost severed Sam's arm with the huge double-handed sword he was lugging around, and Dean had been too busy trying to keep Sam from dying of blood loss to do more than shoot an entire clip into Jeremiah's face.

He should have known better. Necromancers were like cockroaches; stomp on them and they just came back for more. They always had captive demons or magic vials or some sort of crazy resurrection bullshit, and Dean _knew_ that. He'd even seen Jeremiah's summoning circle when they went into the warehouse, and made a mental note to destroy it on the way out, but he'd been distracted – first by Sam's telekinetic antics, and then by his brother almost getting himself killed – and he hadn't been careful enough, and it was his own goddamn fault that Sam wasn't with him right then, making fun of him for believing his dreams.

Because Dean _did_ believe them. There was no doubt in his mind that the latest dream had been real, and meaningful, and that it would point him in the right direction to – to find Sam, or at least what was left of him, and to send Jeremiah Woolridge straight to hell. He knew it was real because the sigil he'd seen in his dream was tattooed on Jeremiah's right arm. Probably in blood, knowing necromancers.

He was done with making mistakes. He was going to kill that crazy son of a bitch, and this time he was going to make damn sure that the bastard stayed dead.

He left Dad a message from the road and lied to him for the first time in his life, saying that he was going to Boston to check out a haunting, no big deal, maybe they could meet up in New York City for a few days when he was done. The lie didn't sit easy with him, but he knew if he told Dad what he thought was going on, Dad would show up in Boston, whether Dean wanted him to or not. When he was growing up, Dad had drilled it into Dean's head to always take responsibility for his actions. Dean was going to handle Jeremiah himself.

He felt alive again, suddenly, like he'd been in stasis for the past five months and was only now waking up. Boston was cold and miserable. Dean checked in to a youth hostel, trying to stay even further under the radar than usual. God only knew what sorts of creepy demons Jeremiah had poking around the city. Dean had no idea how Sam had managed to get that dream through, but he was willing to bet dollars to donuts that Jeremiah had noticed and was on the lookout.

A single room was more expensive, but Dean was willing to pay extra to be able to clean his weapons without backpacking hippies calling the cops.

He spent his first day in the city evil-proofing the room, using every kind of protective magic he'd ever learned: herbs, sigils, iron, even his own blood, drawn in a double line on the door frame and on the wall around the window. He wasn't taking any chances. He was going to do things right, this time, no fucking up, no oversights.

The second day, he drove to Jeremiah's old place in South Boston to see if he could learn anything about the dude's whereabouts. The house looked better than it had the last time Dean had been there; it had been repainted, and there were some flowers planted along the front walk.

A girl in her early twenties came to the door when Dean rang the bell. He did his best to appear both harmless and charming. "Hi," he said, "my name's Todd. I'm looking for an old buddy of mine, he lived here a few years ago?"

The girl looked wary, but she wasn't slamming the door in his face. "I've only lived here for a couple months," she said, "and there was a family with three kids living here before me. I can give you the landlady's address, though; she might be able to tell you something."

Jackpot. "Yeah, that'd be great," Dean said.

The landlady was an old woman named Doris who clearly didn't want to waste any time messing around. She looked Dean up and down when she answered the door, made a scoffing noise, and told him to come inside for some coffee. She ushered him into her living room and left him there to cool his heels while she brewed the coffee in the kitchen.

Dean looked around. The furniture was all really old, like pre-World War II old. There were heavy drapes drawn over the windows, and the room was dark and musty. Dean picked up a little china elephant that was sitting on the end table, and then set it down quickly when Doris came back into the room. She raised an eyebrow at him. Dean squirmed.

"Jeremiah Woolridge, huh?" she asked, handing him a cup of coffee and sitting down next to him on the threadbare sofa.

"Yes ma'am," Dean said. "We were in the Army together."

"That's funny," Doris said. "He never mentioned any of his Army buddies."

"Uh, well," Dean said, thinking fast, "we kind of had a falling out. That's why I'm looking for him now. Trying to mend my fences and all that."

"Huh," Doris said.

"So, uh, do you know where he is?" Dean took a sip of his coffee and almost spit it back into the cup. It was _sweet_. And _milky_.

"Honestly, son, I was more than a little glad to see Jeremiah go. I haven't done much to keep track of him. Last I heard, he was living in some dump in Jamaica Plain, and that was a while back. But you know, I think I might have his cell phone number lying around here somewhere. Could be it hasn't been disconnected yet."

"I'd sure be grateful if you could give it to me," Dean said, and gave her a smile that showed off every one of his teeth.

"You just sit tight, I'll have to go look for it," Doris said, and heaved herself up off the sofa. Dean heard her footsteps going up the stairs. She was gone a long time. He fidgeted uncomfortably. No-nonsense women always made him nervous. He surreptitiously poured some of his coffee into Doris' cup.

"Here we are," Doris said, coming back into the room. She gave him a scrap of paper with a phone number written on it. "Is there anything else I can do for you?"

It was a clear dismissal. Dean stood up, and Doris walked him to the door.

"Thanks for all your help, ma'am," Dean said, being extra super polite, because Doris looked like she wouldn't hesitate to take a switch to his ass. "I appreciate you taking the time."

"I hope you find that Jeremiah," Doris said. "He's crazy as two fruitcakes, but he could use a friend like you, coming around to look in on him."

Crazy as two fruitcakes was right, Dean thought, walking to the car. And Dean was really goddamn glad about it, too: Jeremiah's insanity was the biggest advantage Dean had, and he was planning to milk it for all it was worth.

He was opening the car door when he spotted something lurking in the trees on the other side of the road. It was too big to be a crow. Dean narrowed his eyes, trying to make out the shape of it. He got in the car and drove a few blocks, then pulled over to the side and parked. The thing had followed him, just as he expected.

He got out of the car and walked into an alley and waited there, fairly certain of what the thing was and what it wanted. Sure enough, a little messenger demon came scuttling around the corner on all fours, and it scaled a pile of boxes until it was staring Dean right in the face.

"Jeremiah sent you, I take it," Dean said, grossed out by the thing's pointy tail and pointy teeth and slimy black skin. He'd dealt with this kind of demon before, and they were mostly harmless, but they still creeped him out. He was careful not to make eye contact with it and to keep his shields up. Chances were Jeremiah had ordered the thing to scope him out, see what his defenses were like.

"Your brother's dead," the demon hissed, cutting right to the chase. "We have his bones."

"You're lying," Dean said, wishing he was sure of it but wary of being played. His heart started beating faster anyway. "If he was dead, you wouldn't be trying to keep me from looking for him. What's Jeremiah so afraid of?"

The demon licked its lips, its beady little eyes darting around wildly. "He's just trying to avoid having to kill you," it said finally. "He's got better things to do with his time. You'd better give it up. You don't stand a chance, you know. He's even more powerful than he was the last time you ran up against him, and this time he's not going to let you walk away from it."

"You tell Jeremiah I've got a fucking milk carton full of holy water with his name on it."

"I'll be sure to let him know," the demon said, and flapped off, its wings struggling to keep its fat little body in the air.

Dean let out a long breath. If Jeremiah was sending his minions out looking for Dean, it meant he was at least a little nervous. And if Sam wasn't really dead – if he was –

He couldn't let himself think about it. He couldn't be distracted. He needed to be sharp, focused; he needed to get the job done, and at the end, if Sam was there – well, he'd cross that bridge as he came to it.

He went to the nearest tattoo parlor, the sketch he'd drawn of Jeremiah's sigil clutched in one hand. He had it inked on the soft underside of his right arm, just below the elbow crease.

"That some sort of tribal thing?" the tattoo guy asked.

"I guess you could say that," Dean said. If he got really, really lucky, all the magic Jeremiah had built up around himself – all of the demons and spirits of dead people, the wards, the booby-traps, the summoning spells – might recognize the sigil and mistake him for Jeremiah. And if it _didn't_ work – well, there was no such thing as having too many protective tattoos.

He checked the cell phone number when he got back to the hostel. It was out of service. He was back to square one.

***

Dean was frustrated and angry. He'd been in the city for a week, following up one useless lead after another, each one leading him nowhere. Jeremiah's old boss didn't know where he was; his ex-girlfriend didn't know where he was; and now it turned out his childhood best friend didn't know where he was either. It was like the guy had disappeared off the face of the fucking planet. Jeremiah wasn't all that dangerous, but he was a slippery motherfucker, and tracking him down was turning out to be a gigantic pain in the ass.

To make matters worse, Dean kept having the same dream every night, about some fucking two-story row house with a black iron fence. His journal was full of drawings of the building, and every sketch he'd made looked exactly the same. It could have been any house in Boston – hell, any house anywhere in the country. For all Dean knew, Jeremiah wasn't even _in_ Boston anymore. He could have left the country, gone underground, entered the goddamn astral plane.

He spent the rest of the day driving around the city, blasting Metallica and daydreaming about cigarettes. It was the motions of it he missed more than the taste or the nicotine high. Smoking had given him something to do with his hands; they never had to be empty. Now they just tapped uselessly on the wheel. He was all out of Dum Dums.

That night he dreamed about the fucking house again and woke up at dawn in a foul mood. It was raining. There wasn't enough coffee in the world to make him ready to face the day. He was so sick of dreaming about that goddamn house. Dean had watched enough bad movies to recognize when something was Significant, but he didn't know what it _meant_. He wasn't being given enough information. It was like reading a book in a foreign language, maybe Spanish – you could recognize a few words here and there, but you could never understand what the story was really about.

Dean hated the East Coast, and he hated big cities. It was making him antsy as fuck. He went down the hall to brush his teeth, and when he looked at himself in the mirror he barely recognized the person he saw there. He'd lost weight, and his skin was almost see-through, like the bones were shining right through it.

He drove around the city's older neighborhoods that day, looking for a house like the one he'd seen in his dream, but they all had bay windows or too many stories or the yard was too small. His life had turned into one big dead end. There was nothing guiding him. He was lost.

When he went out to find some dinner, he ended up buying a six-pack of Budweiser and taking it back to the hostel with him. He finished it off in an hour, watched some Wheel of Fortune, and passed out in his clothes.

He dreamed about the house again. He was standing just inside the gate. The front yard was so overgrown that he could barely make out the brick walkway leading up to the porch. There were numbers on the wall beside the door, but they were blurred and indistinct. Dean took a step forward, trying to get closer, and then his phone started ringing.

"What the fuck," he said, and the sound of his voice was what finally woke him up. He rubbed his eyes, trying to shake off the sleep, and fumbled his cell phone out of his pocket. It was 10:13.

"What," he snapped.

It was his dad. "I've got some news I thought you'd like to hear," he said.

Dean sat up in bed, suddenly wide awake. "I'm all ears."

"Got a call from Randy. He said you asked him to contact the FBI."

"That's right," Dean said. Dad would probably chew him out for it, but he didn't give a shit anymore.

Dad let it slide, though. "Well, somebody called the police and said they saw a tall man with brown hair being pulled out of a van in DC about a week and a half ago. You're a lot closer than I am, so I thought I'd send you down there to check it out. Probably isn't anything, but better safe than sorry."

"You're shitting me," Dean said. His hands were shaking.

"No," Dad said. "No, son, I'm not."

"Okay," Dean said. "Um. Okay. Do you have an address?"

Dad gave it to him. He was quiet for a while, and then he said, "Be careful, Dean."

"Yes sir," Dean said.

He wouldn't be able to check out of the hostel until the next morning, so he packed up his bags and went back to bed. He was too wired to sleep, though. He lay there staring at the ceiling until morning.

***

I-95 always gave him fits. Fifty miles out of Boston, Dean was about ready to gnaw off his own arm. He only stopped at gas stations, to refill the tank and to pee, and to buy enough coffee and junk food to keep him going until the next stop. He hated everyone in the world: every slow old lady in the fast lane, every trucker who wouldn't let him pass. He clenched his jaw so hard it gave him a headache.

It was the middle of rush hour when he hit DC. He spent an hour stuck on the Beltway before he had a breakdown behind the wheel, pulled off at the next exit, and checked in to the first motel he saw. He was nowhere near where he wanted to be, but if he'd stayed on that highway for one more minute, he would have swerved into the median and ended his misery.

He stayed up late putting wards on the room. It was bigger than his room in the hostel, and it took longer to get everything battened down. It was past midnight by the time he crashed. He didn't dream.

In the morning, Dean drove to Anacostia to check out the address his dad had given him. Sure enough, there was a big-ass white van out front, but – the house didn't look like the one from his dream. Dean felt like an asshole for starting to believe in all this New Age bullshit after years of healthy skepticism, but his intuition rarely led him astray, and right then every one of his gut instincts was screaming that he hadn't found the right place yet.

He still didn't have a goddamn idea where to look, though. He swore and banged on the steering wheel for a while, and he felt less irritated after that. He drove around the neighborhood, just checking things out, feeling conspicuously white all the while.

Then he turned a corner and Jesus fuck _there_ , there it was, the house, _the_ house, the one he'd been dreaming about. It was right there at the end of the block, an end unit row house, iron fence and overgrown yard and all.

Dean slammed on the brakes, his other foot automatically pumping the clutch. The car behind him blared its horn. Dean didn't pay any attention. He pulled over to the curb in a daze and cut the ignition.

He sat there for a long time. All his searching and he'd found the place through dumb luck. He didn't know what to do next.

Except that wasn't true – he knew _exactly_ what to do. He'd killed Jeremiah once and there was no way he couldn't do it again.

He drove across the county line into Prince George's to find a motel. No _way_ was he staying in Anacostia. Dean wasn't afraid of much, but he wasn't dumb, either.

He spent the evening getting his weapons ready and drawing defensive sigils on his body with a permanent marker. It was a clear night, and cold. Only a few stars were visible past the city's light pollution, but the handful Dean could see out the motel window shone bright and steady. A few airplanes tracked across the sky, heading home or over the sea.

Sam was in his dreams that night – just regular dreams, no prophetic weight to them. They were eating ice cream cones, and Sam dropped his on the sidewalk. "Now you have to give me yours," he said to Dean, and Dean said, "Okay," and handed his over. Then they were in a hallway. Sam was running down it, laughing, and Dean was trying to follow but he couldn't go fast enough. "Wait up," he called, but Sam just kept going, until he turned a corner and disappeared.

In the morning, he packed his duffel, ate breakfast at McDonald's, and drove back to the house. He parked one street over and walked, determined to keep the Impala out of the line of fire.

He went around back and picked the lock on the door. It was 7:00. Dean's breath puffed out in clouds. He nudged the door open and crept inside. The house was quiet; Jeremiah was probably still asleep. Dean went into the kitchen, his gun drawn, and almost jumped out of his skin when he felt something _grab_ him.

He twisted his head around, but he didn't see anything. It must have been Jeremiah's wards. Whatever it was gave him a thorough once-over, like it was trying to decide if he belonged there. Dean held his breath. If the tattoo didn't work, he was fucked; the magic Jeremiah was harnessing could probably crush him like a bug.

The thing released him abruptly, apparently decided he was nothing to worry about. Dean staggered a little, his balance thrown. His heart was pounding. That had been close. Jeremiah was working with more complex magic than he had been the last time Dean ran into him, and it made Dean nervous. He'd underestimated Jeremiah's ability to get his shit together.

He pulled out the EMF reader. It was off the charts, of course. Jeremiah had probably summoned the spirits of dozens of dead people and bound them into the walls of the house – and that plus the consorting with demons and whatever the hell else Jeremiah was up to – no wonder the dude was so buckets of crazy. That much magical energy would drive anyone up the wall.

He peered into the living room. Like the rest of the house, it was completely empty, no furniture or anything. The mark of a true psycho. He stepped into the room, a floorboard creaked, and that was when he saw the messenger demon perched on the mantel over the fireplace.

Its head jerked up when the floor squeaked, and it launched itself into the air a second later, screaming loud and wordless. Dean, cursing under his breath, raised his gun and fired a bullet right into the thing's head. It dropped to the floor in a slimy black heap.

Fuck. Well, if Jeremiah hadn't known Dean was there before, he sure as hell knew it now.

Something rattled around upstairs. There was the sound of footsteps. Dean stuck his head around the doorjamb, keeping his gun up.

Jeremiah came down the stairs like he was making an entrance into a Viennese ball. He was wearing a long black robe with trailing sleeves, and there was a different messenger demon perched on his shoulder like a demented hawk. Dean rolled his eyes.

"I see you've come back to me, Dean Winchester," Jeremiah said, raising his hands, probably about to summon something extremely unpleasant.

"I sure fucking have," Dean said, and fired three bullets into Jeremiah's chest.

The demon vanished with a loud pop. Jeremiah tumbled down the stairs and landed at Dean's feet. Dean fired another bullet into his forehead for good measure. Jeremiah's mouth flopped open.

"You shot me," he said, his body motionless but the sound coming out of him nonetheless. Dean shuddered. That was always the worst part.

"I sure fucking did," Dean said. "Now tell me where you're keeping my brother."

"He's dead," Jeremiah's voice said.

"His body, then," Dean ground out.

"Why would I tell you that?" Jeremiah asked.

"Fine," Dean said. He shot a few more bullets into Jeremiah's face. "You just sit tight while I find your crazy necromancy shit and burn it all. No way in hell you're coming back to life this time, you sociopathic motherfucker."

He left Jeremiah's body lying there, slowly bleeding out. He had to work fast. If he didn't find whatever it was Jeremiah was using to keep his soul tied to the world, the bastard would just reanimate himself, and then Dean would be in a shit-ton of trouble, because he would come back stronger and probably bring a whole battalion of demons with him.

The lower level of the house was empty. He stepped over Jeremiah's body and ran upstairs. All the rooms up there were empty, too, except for one bedroom with a bare mattress on the floor.

_Shit, shit,_ Dean thought, looking around frantically. It had to be _somewhere_ in the house, there was no way Jeremiah would be stupid enough to keep his talisman some place he couldn't get to it in a hurry.

He went in circles around the upstairs, getting more and more worried, his heart pounding, and then a thought struck him and he looked _up_ , and sure enough, there was a set of pulldown stairs in the middle of the hallway ceiling. Dean grabbed the rope and hauled on it, and the stairs unfolded, nice as you please. The hinges were well-oiled. It was clear Jeremiah had been going up there a lot.

He scrambled up the stairs, flicking on his flashlight as he went. The attic was _crammed_ with shit: at least four or five bookcases covered with skulls and little glass jars and melted candle stubs; a bike hanging from the rafters; what looked like the entire contents of a discount furniture store. Dim light filtered in through the roof.

Goddammit, Dean didn't have _time_ to sort through all that shit! He would have just knocked over all the shelves, but he had to use the talisman to destroy Jeremiah's corpse; if he just broke it, Jeremiah's spirit would be trapped in the house, and wouldn't that just be a joy and a pleasure.

"I hope you rot in hell, Jeremiah!" he yelled, frustrated and infuriated. He thought he knew what the talisman looked like – he'd caught a glimpse of something, back in Boston last year, that he was pretty sure was it; but he wasn't absolutely certain, and he had to find in the midst of all Jeremiah's packrat bullshit.

He started going through the shelves, shoving things aside to get a look at the little trinkets and tacky pieces of shit Jeremiah had crammed onto every spare inch of space. The first two bookcases had nothing, but on the third, he found what he was looking for: a small figurine of a frog with a wide-open mouth.

"Ostendo," Dean murmured, and sure enough, the thing started glowing, just a weak fuzzy light, but enough.

Finally, finally – Dean shoved over all the other bookcases, listening with satisfaction to the sounds of things shattering against the floor, and then he was clattering down the pulldown stairs and then down the main staircase, ready to take care of Jeremiah once and for all –

But Jeremiah wasn't there. The pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs was gone too, the floorboards looking as clean as they day they were laid down.

"Fuck," Dean breathed. Someone chuckled in the living room. He darted in there, pulling out his shotgun.

Jeremiah was standing in the middle of a summoning circle, looking fresh and healthy. There were two ugly-ass demons lounging against the wall, and their heads shot up when Dean came into the room.

"Get him," Jeremiah ordered without even looking at Dean.

The demons flowed over the floor like liquid. Dean shot one of them full of rock salt, and it disappeared with a shriek, but the other one backhanded Dean and lifted him off the floor, pressing him back against the wall, its breath hot and sour in his face. Dean's guns fell to the floor and skittered across the room.

"Don't kill," Jeremiah said.

Dean struggled, but the demon was a hell of a lot stronger than him. "All right," he panted, "you got me, Jeremiah. I give up. What are you gonna do with me now?"

"Oh, I don't know," Jeremiah said. "I was thinking about sacrificing you. There's this really powerful spirit I'd like to summon, but it requires human blood, and I'm not too keen on using my own."

"I'm sorry to hear it," Dean said.

Jeremiah smirked. "Oh, I bet you are. Put him out," he said to the demon, and the last thing Dean saw was the demon's fist swinging toward his face.

He woke up to the sound of Jeremiah's voice, chanting something in a language Dean didn't recognize. He was lying on the floor of the kitchen, his hands and feet tied with rope. The linoleum tile pressed hard against his spine. His left cheek was throbbing, probably split open. He tugged experimentally at his bindings. The knots were tight, and they held.

The remaining demon leaned over him, hissing, its tongue flickering out like a snake's. Dean twisted his head away and look around the room. Jeremiah was standing by the sink, stirring a goblet with a pink plastic spoon that looked like it came from Baskin-Robbins. The talisman was on the counter beside him.

"Keep an eye on him," Jeremiah said, not turning around. He'd taken off his robe and was wearing a yellow t-shirt that said "Hispanic Pride" on the back in huge letters.

The demon crouched on the floor next to Dean's head and grinned at him, all teeth. Dean glared at it.

"So, what's the deal, Jeremiah?" Dean asked. "You gonna go ahead and sacrifice me?"

"Only if you ask very, very nicely," Jeremiah said. He brought the spoon to his mouth, tasting. A few droplets spilled over and splattered on the floor. They were red, congealed. Dean shuddered.

"It's hard to find good anti-coagulants these days," Jeremiah said.

"That's disgusting," Dean said.

Jeremiah turned around, eyebrows raised. "You fucked your own brother, Dean Winchester. I'd think about that before you go around accusing decent, hard-working folks of committing immoral acts."

Dean started thrashing around, struggling to get free. "There's no way you can know that!" he yelled. Fucking Jeremiah.

"Oh, I know everything," Jeremiah said.

Except he clearly _didn't_ , because Dean could feel the sweet length of his knife inside his boot. Jeremiah had gotten better, but he wasn't good enough. He'd forgotten to search Dean, and all Dean needed was a distraction, some way to get at that knife, and he'd be golden.

Jeremiah came over and crouched beside the demon, holding the goblet in one hand and a little paring knife in the other. "Hold him," he told the demon. Dean struggled, but the demon grabbed his bound hands and forced him to stop squirming around.

"That's a good boy," Jeremiah said, and patted Dean's hurt cheek. Dean winced, and then winced again as Jeremiah replaced his hand with the paring knife. Jeremiah slashed quickly, the knife cutting deep, and Dean yelped and jerked.

"You like that, hmm?" Jeremiah asked, using his goblet to catch the blood welling up from Dean's cheek.

"I just can't get enough," Dean said. The demon snickered. Dean wanted to gouge out its eyeballs with his bare hands.

Jeremiah went back to the sink and picked up his plastic spoon again. Dean looked away. He could feel blood trickling down his face.

There was a crashing noise from somewhere in the house. Jeremiah whirled around and pointed at the demon with his spoon. "Go find it," he ordered.

The demon leaped to its feet and bounded out of the kitchen. Jeremiah turned back to the sink and there was Dean's distraction, right on cue. He sat up and grabbed his knife out of his boot, and threw it across the room. It wasn't easy to do with his hands tied together, but his aim was good and the knife hit home in the middle of Jeremiah's back.

Jeremiah made a gurgling sound and collapsed to the floor. Dean crawled over and pulled the knife out of Jeremiah's back, using it to slice through the ropes around his wrists and ankles.

"You killed me again!" Jeremiah's voice said.

"You sure are quick on the uptake." Dean grabbed the talisman off the counter and dropped it onto Jeremiah's chest. "Tell me where my brother is," he said, "you murdering bastard."

"I'll never say a word," Jeremiah said.

"Have it your way," Dean said, and chanted the words of the banishing spell. Nothing happened. Dean blinked. "What the fuck?"

Jeremiah's voice chuckled meanly. "Ha! Ha!" he bellowed, really playing up the whole Evil Overlord thing. "You didn't _really_ think it would be that easy, did you?"

"I was kinda hoping," Dean said. He threw the fake talisman to the floor in disgust. The real one could have been anywhere. He was fucked.

"Give me ten minutes and I'll be right with you," Jeremiah said.

"Shit," Dean said. He went into the living room and picked up his guns, and then scuffed his boots through the summoning circle, breaking the lines of sand. At least Jeremiah wouldn't be able to call any more demons – unless he had another circle squirreled away somewhere, which was definitely possible.

Dean closed his eyes, a little frantic, his mind racing. There was no way he'd be able to find the real talisman before Jeremiah resurrected himself again. There _had_ to be something else, some other way, but Dean had no goddamn clue what it was.

But that wasn't true, he _did_ know, he could almost _see_ the diagram on the page of the dusty book he and Sam had spent all winter break looking at, back when Dean was in high school.

"Come on, come on," he muttered, forcing himself to calm down and think clearly, and then it snapped into his mind, vivid as a picture: the Star of Athena, its intricate lines traced out right there in his head. It wasn't Jeremiah's talisman, but it would get rid of him just the same.

Jeremiah was still conked out on the kitchen floor. "You're back!" he said, sounding delighted.

"Did you miss me?" Dean asked sarcastically. He rummaged through the cabinets until he found a canister of salt. Then he dragged Jeremiah into the back entry hall and started laying out the Star. Jeremiah yelled obscenities at him the whole time, but Dean did his best to tune it out. If he didn't make the Star just right, it would probably backfire and he'd end up possessed or worse. But he was fucked either way, and it was a risk he was willing to take.

By the time he finished, Jeremiah's body was starting to twitch. Dean took a deep breath and said the words of the banishing spell, and Jeremiah's body twitched harder, his head whipping back and forth until his neck snapped.

"What are you doing to me!" Jeremiah wailed, and there was a popping noise, and something glowed orange in his chest. He sizzled and disintegrated, smoking and letting off sparks until all that was left was a nasty black stain on the floor.

Dean sighed and rubbed his eyes, shaky from adrenaline. So much for that.

The house was silent. He walked around the downstairs, aimlessly, feeling bewildered. His face hurt. He reached up to touch his cheek and felt flakes of dried blood.

Something was thumping around below him. Dean hadn't thought the house had a basement, but he found a door in the utility room with stairs leading down into the darkness. He flicked on the light switch and headed down.

The basement was empty except for a rebar cage in one corner. Dean almost didn't let himself look. He almost turned around and went right back up the stairs. If it turned out to be nothing, it would kill him. He wouldn't make it through.

But there was a person in the cage, and as Dean cleared the last few steps, the shaggy head lifted, the features obscured by a thick beard, but God, Dean would know him anywhere, the shape of his shoulders, the way his eyelids lowered and rose again.

"Dean?" Sam said. His voice cracked in the middle of the word, and he stretched his hands out through the bars of the cage, reaching out toward Dean.

"I'm here, Sammy, I'm here, it's okay," Dean said, falling to his knees beside the cage, and then he started crying: awful, wracking sobs, his whole body shaking, like he was going to fall to pieces right there on the stained concrete floor.


	3. Chapter 3

**EPILOGUE  
** December 2007  
No way in hell was Dean staying in DC a moment longer than absolutely necessary. Sam was weak, but he could still walk, which was all that Dean needed. He wrapped Sam in a blanket, put him in the back seat of the car, and didn't stop driving until they hit West Virginia. He was too exhausted to go any further than that.

The first thing he did, as soon as they were on I-66 heading out of DC, was call Dad.

"Let me talk to him," Dad said after a long silence.

"He's asleep in the back seat of the car right now," Dean said.

Dad was quiet again. He made a few muffled noises. Dean didn't say anything, just gave him time to pull himself together.

"You did good, son," Dad said finally, all choked up. "You did real good."

"Can you come meet us in Lawrence? I'm hoping to be there day after tomorrow."

"I'll be there," Dad said.

The second thing he did, as soon as they checked in to the Sweet Creek Motor Inn, was take Sam to a barber to get a haircut and a shave.

"You been up in the woods or something?" the barber asked, smirking.

"Something like that," Sam said, his voice still raspy from disuse. Dean sat in one of the chairs along the wall, pretending to read a magazine but really watching Sam like a hawk, afraid he would disappear again if Dean looked away for more than three milliseconds.

"Well, just don't turn into one of them damn hippies," the barber said.

Dean took Sam back to the motel after that and put him in the shower. It was a hard sight to see. Sam was pale and rail-thin, malnourished, shaky on his feet. It made Dean want to kill Jeremiah all over again.

"I can wash myself," Sam rasped.

"No, you can't," Dean argued. "You seriously want to fight about this? A thirteen-year-old girl could kick your ass right now. Just fucking hold still and let me do it."

Sam managed to dress himself, but it was a near thing.

"You're lucky I held on to your duffel," Dean said, handing Sam a pair of jeans.

"Sentimental bastard," Sam said, but he was smiling.

"That's me," Dean said.

"I want Chinese," Sam said, fumbling with the buttons on his shirt until Dean batted his hands away and did it himself. "Can we have Chinese?"

"I don't know if there's any Chinese in this town, baby."

"Can we have pizza then? With pineapple?"

"I don't know if they have pineapple, either," Dean said.

Sam rolled his eyes and shoved at Dean's shoulder, utterly failing to move him. "You dickhead! Of course they have pineapple."

"They might have pineapple," Dean admitted.

They had pineapple. Dean picked every piece off his slices and handed them all to Sam, who happily ate each one.

"I love pineapple," Sam said, munching away.

"Yeah," Dean said, "I know." He forgot to eat, just sat there and watched Sam fuss with his pizza, dipping it in the garlic sauce and rolling up the last couple of inches so he didn't have to eat the crust plain.

"Come to bed with me," Sam said, later, rolled up tight in the blankets. Only the very top of his head was visible, his eyes just barely peeking over the edge of the comforter.

When Dean climbed into bed, Sam released his cocoon and pulled Dean in with him, wrapping him up too, both of them wound tight in the bedding. They clutched at each other in the darkened room. Dean fell asleep feeling Sam's breath puffing against his neck.

He woke sometime in the night because Sam was nibbling at his collarbone.

"Whamahuh," Dean mumbled.

Sam chuckled. "You're awake," he said, and as if to prove his point, he moved his head and kissed Dean with intent, his tongue pressing slickly into Dean's mouth.

"God," Dean said, keeping his voice low in the quiet room, and buried his hand in Sam's hair, kissing him back. He felt wide awake, ready for anything Sam wanted.

Sam rolled over, pulling Dean on top of him, and all of the blankets fell onto the floor. Dean leaned over to grab at them, but Sam said, "Dean! Just leave them there!"

"What, you can't wait five seconds?" Dean asked, but he abandoned the blankets and kissed Sam's pouting mouth.

"No," Sam said. He ran his hands down the bare skin of Dean's back, his fingers tracing lightly over the ridge of Dean's spine and then slipping under the waistband of Dean's boxers. Dean shivered, felt himself getting hard.

He pulled back and shoved at the hem of Sam's t-shirt, pushing it up his chest, and Sam raised his arms obediently so that Dean could pull it all the way off. He ran a hand down Sam's torso, feeling his protruding ribs, the fragile stretch of skin over them. He bent his head and pressed a kiss to Sam's sternum.

"We're gonna be getting free food in every restaurant from here to Kansas," Dean murmured, his mouth still pressed to Sam's chest. He drew his fingers teasingly down Sam's sides, right where Sam was ticklish, and Sam shrieked and flopped around.

"Stop it!" he hollered, laughing, and grabbed at Dean's arms to stop him, twisting his right arm around. He stopped. "Hey," he said, turning Dean's arm so he could look at the tattoo there. "This is new."

"Yeah," Dean said, not wanting to talk about it.

Sam didn't pry. He pulled Dean's arm toward him and pressed his mouth to the soft skin there, his tongue tracing the whorls of the tattoo and licking upward toward the crease of Dean's elbow. Then he bit down, setting an imprint of his teeth into the sigil, and Dean's hips twitched.

Sam grinned. "I know you like that," he said, and starting tugging at Dean's boxers. "You've got too many clothes on."

Dean kicked his shorts off and stripped Sam's away too, dropping them on the floor beside the bed. He sat back on his knees, just looking at Sam, the familiar lines of his body, the scar on his leg from falling out of a tree when he was twelve.

"Quit messing around," Sam demanded.

"I'm not messing," Dean said, but he didn't move. He could spend the next five years just sitting there watching Sam, proving to himself that Sam was really still alive.

" _Dean_ ," Sam said. He drew his leg up invitingly and trailed one hand down his body to his cock, rubbing his fingers lightly over the head.

And okay, maybe there were a few things Dean wanted to do other than just look. Sam wrapped his hand around his cock and started to stroke, smirking a little, and that was it for Dean. He dropped to his elbows, bracing his arms on either side of Sam's head, and pressed the full length of his body against his brother's.

"Yeah, yeah," Sam moaned, bucking his hips, angling until his cock was nestled right up against Dean's, and he started thrusting, rubbing their cocks together, his fingers digging hard into Dean's back.

Dean felt languid, self-indulgent. He rocked his hips against Sam, slow and dirty, taking his time, tension coiling red hot in his lower back and his balls. He kissed every part of Sam he could reach: his eyelids, the line of his jaw, the pulsing artery in his neck. Sam's heartbeat fluttered urgently beneath Dean's tongue.

Sam was moaning extravagantly, his head tossing back and forth on the pillow, saying, "Come on, Dean, do it, yeah, come all over me," and Dean ducked his head and sucked on Sam's lower lip just to get him to shut up.

Sam thrust up _hard_ , his bony hipbones jabbing into Dean, and he wrenched his head away and shouted as he came, spilling hot between their bodies.

Dean pulled back far enough that he could watch his own cock rubbing tight circles on the smooth skin of Sam's belly, the flushed head leaving sticky trails. He was so close he could hardly breathe. His balls tightened up, his orgasm building at the base of his spine, a tidal wave rising up slow and devastating.

"Come on me," Sam said again, gasping, and Dean did: his hips thrusting all ragged, eyes rolling back in his head as he shot all over Sam's belly.

He collapsed on top of Sam and lay there in the dark for a while, listening to Sam's uneven breathing.

"You're heavy," Sam said eventually, and Dean rolled off him with a groan. He reached an arm over the side of the bed, snagging Sam's t-shirt and using it to clean them both up a little.

Sam rolled over so he was facing Dean and laid his head on Dean's shoulder, curling his body around Dean's, slinging a leg over Dean's thighs. "You really thought I was dead?" Sam asked.

"Yeah," Dean said. "Yeah, I did." He brought a hand up to rest on Sam's shoulder and closed his eyes.

He thought Sam would fall right asleep, but instead Sam kept fidgeting around, and after a while he sat up and pulled the blankets back onto the bed. Dean cracked an eye open.

"I'm cold," Sam said. He lay back down, wrapping himself around Dean. His feet were like fucking ice cubes.

Dean yawned. "You feel like telling me what happened?" he asked. They had to talk about it eventually, and Sam apparently wasn't going to sleep for a while.

Sam was quiet for so long that Dean didn't think he was going to respond, but then he made a little huffing sound and said, "Jeremiah was messing with my head."

"Yeah," Dean said, "I kind of figured."

"That last night, after we killed the nukekubi – he kept trying to convince me that I was a danger to you, that I should leave so you would be safe, and – " Sam broke off.

"And you believed him," Dean finished. "You should have said something."

"Well, it's not like I realized what was going on! I didn't figure it out until later."

"You did it to yourself," Dean said, realizing. "You, what, you _teleported_ yourself out of the motel room?"

"Something like that." Sam laughed dryly. "You know, for weeks all I could think about was how mad you were going to be at me for leaving."

"I didn't know you _left_ ," Dean said. "I thought you got taken or something, I didn't know what happened."

"Are you mad at me now?" Sam asked.

Dean shrugged. "It doesn't sound like you had much of a choice." He rubbed Sam's shoulder in long, soothing strokes. "So he just kept you in his basement for six months?" Dean had probably broken whatever binding spell Jeremiah had been using on Sam when he shoved over all the bookshelves.

"Not all the time. I mean, he let me out now and then. He was pretty nice to me, actually. I think he was leeching off me somehow, like, using me to summon demons and stuff." Sam sighed. "I think the original plan was to kill me – you know, get revenge – but I guess he decided I was more useful to him alive."

"How'd you manage to send me those dreams?"

Sam shrugged. "He was distracted, trying to summon Abraham Lincoln's spirit or something. I don't think it worked."

"Yeah, I bet," Dean said. He kept rubbing Sam's shoulder. They lay there in silence for a few minutes, Dean relishing the glide of Sam's skin beneath his palm.

"Say something, Dean," Sam said.

"I missed you," Dean blurted out. "Christ, Sam, I thought you were _dead_ , I – " He broke off and turned his face away.

Sam propped himself up on one elbow and kissed Dean's shoulder, the hollow at the base of his neck, until Dean turned back toward him and kissed his mouth.

"How'd you find me?" Sam asked.

There were so many answers Dean could give to that question. In the end, he just said, "I got lucky."

In the morning, Sam was still asleep when Dean woke up. He pulled on his clothes and drove to the diner to buy bagels and muffins and fruit salad. Sam didn't twitch a muscle when Dean came back inside and dropped his keys on the table. He made coffee and waited for Sam to wake up.

Sam rolled out of bed around 9:30 and staggered into the bathroom. Dean watched his progress over the top of his newspaper. Sam clattered around in the bathroom for a while, then came back out and sat down across the table from Dean.

"There's coffee," Dean said.

"Okay," Sam said, opening the paper bag from the diner. "You got blueberry muffins."

"Nice to see you've still got those sharp observational skills," Dean said. He turned to the sports section. The Cowboys kept getting their asses beat, and he was not pleased.

Sam munched on his muffin. "So, we're going to Kansas?" he asked.

"Don't talk with your mouth full," Dean said, just to see the glare that Sam shot at him. He grinned. "Yeah, we're going to Lawrence. Dad's gonna meet us there. I figure we'll turn you over to Missouri for a couple weeks, and after that – well, you can go back to Stanford, I guess, or whatever." He stared intently at the newspaper.

Sam crumpled up the muffin wrapper. "Is _that_ what you're worrying about? Dean. I can move things around with my _mind_. I can _read people's thoughts_. I don't think college is really the ideal place for me."

"So you aren't leaving," Dean said, feeling something in his chest loosen up and break wide open. He put the paper down on the table.

"No," Sam said. "I'm not. You idiot, I _love_ you. I just spent the last six months remembering how miserable my life is without you. You're never getting rid of me, okay?"

"I don't want you to, uh. Have regrets, I guess," Dean said awkwardly, feeling a little dazed.

Sam shook his head. "I'm not settling, Dean. This isn't second best. I want to be here, I'm _choosing_ to stay here with you." He sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. "There, are we done with the heart-to-heart now?"

"I guess so," Dean said, and grinned stupidly despite himself. Right then, it was enough. They could work out all their other issues later. They had plenty of time. He reached across the table and smacked Sam upside the head. "But if you ever pull that disappearing shit on me again, no way in hell am I gonna come looking for you!"

"Ow, ow, okay!" Sam said, fending Dean off and laughing, and it was music to Dean's ears, the only sound he ever wanted to hear for the rest of his goddamn life. Something was welling up inside of him, buoyant, tentative. It felt like joy.

"Let's get going," he said. "We're burning daylight."

THE END  



End file.
